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THE LIBRARY

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THE UNIVERSITY

OF CALIFORNIA

LOS ANGELES

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WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION ?

MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited

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WHAT DO WE MEAN
BY EDUCATION?

BY

J. WELTON, D.LiT., M.A.

PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION IN THE UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS

AUTHOR OF THE PSYCHOLOGY OF EDUCATION ; THE LOGICAL BASES OF

EDUCATION ; THE ARTICLE ON EDUCATION IN THE ELEVENTH EDITION

OF THE ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA ; PRINCIPLES AND METHODS

OF teaching; a manual OF LOGIC, ETC.

JOINT AUTHOR OF PRINCIPLES AND METHODS OF MORAL TRAINING

MACxMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON

1914

COPYRIGHT

Lh

776~

w

PREFACE

We live in an age of great educational unrest. For
'^ many years enthusiasts have preached ' education ' as a
^ cure for all social ills, and vast sums have been expended
^- on schools. Yet the result is a very general dissatisfac-
■ tion, and the voice of the doubter becomes more insistent
, as the demands on his purse increase. Parents are often
apathetic, sometimes hostile. Employers of all grades
complain that young people come to them from the
schools badly trained, wanting in initiative and adapta-
bility, and in power of serious concentration. Social
reformers confess that there is little sign of a general
elevation of the national character, even when they do
not lament its decadence. Everywhere it is frankly
questioned whether the country is getting an adequate
return for the money it expends on the schools. Yet,
never have teachers, as a body, been more intelligent,
more enthusiastic, more devoted.

Still, the enthusiasts demand an increase of school life
as an unfailing remedy for school defects, and continually
schemes of training are put forward for removing
all cause for complaint. Unhappily these show no
agreement among themselves, are generally based on
superficial analysis of the problem, and often involve
inconsistent principles.

The general consensus that the results of past efforts

VI

PREFACE

are disappointing, shown both by the complaints that are
so common and by the numerous and transient proposals
for reform, suggests the need for an investigation into
fundamental principles. For, unless the foundation is
sound the building cannot be secure. This is the task
I have undertaken.

I am profoundly convinced that theory of education
cannot be separated without disaster from theory of life.
The general disappointment with the results of the work
of the schools seems to me to be largely due to the
misconception that the school is the only educational
agent. Thus the term ' education ' is applied exclusively
to what is only a small part of education, and that part of
intrinsically minor importance ; and then from that frag-
ment results are expected which only education in all its
fullness can produce. This is to separate education from
life, to narrow its aims to the direct and immediate
results of school work, and to disregard the organic unity
which must exist between all forms of educative effort
if the result on life, truly to be desired, is to be attained.
That education in the widest sense is the great lever for
raising humanity is true. That the school alone can apply
that lever is false. In order that the work of education
may succeed, it must be a co-operation between all who
are charged with the bringing up of children, and it must
fix its gaze steadily on the whole range of that life for
which it attempts to prepare. So the fundamental
question must be faced of what that life means, and of
the qualities that make it excellent. Then comes the
secondary questions of how the desired result is to be
secured, and what part in the work legitimately belongs
to each of the communities in which the child lives and
from which he receives formative impulses.

PREFACE vii

It is to such considerations that I have addressed
myself. No attempt has been made to work out
methods in which the principles I advocate may profitably
be applied. For my general views on such practical
questions the reader is referred to other books in which
I have already discussed them. The present work may
be regarded as a consideration of the assumptions which
underlie what I have there written. But it is the prin-
ciples that matter. Nothing is more foreign to my
thought than that my own plans are the only ways in
which those principles can be carried into effect. Each
educator will be most truly an educator when he works
freely under the guidance of vital principles which have
become part and parcel of himself.

J. W.

The University, Leeds,
June, 19 14.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

THE END RULES THE MEANS

The nature of education is in dispute. .

The dispute is partly due to ambiguity of terms, .

but implies different estimates of life. .
Educative effort is related to the end sought.
Ultimate principles cannot be reached inductively,

but a theory of means may be so formed.
The problem is psychological in a three-fold way.
Conditions of successful investigation :

numerical precision is unattainable,

but quantitative estimates are possible ;

forms of mental energy cannot be isolated ; .

fruitful investigation is into educational process.
Education is a science in the making : .

advance must be through discussion ; .

the science differs from physical sciences.
Value of a theory of education. ....
Summary. .......

PAGE
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12

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21

23
26
28
29
32

33

CHAPTER II

WHAT SHOULD BE THE END ?

Education requires a definite aim,

so a consistent theory is of primary importance.
Divergent theories may be partially reconciled.
Synthesis of idealism and naturalism. .

36
38
4'
+3

CONTENTS

Synthesis of internal development and external formation

materialism is the logical goal of rationalism,

it is inadequate to explain life ; .

life is spiritual, ......

its highest expression is religion. .
Synthesis of intellectual and moral aims.
Synthesis of liberal culture and utilitarian training :

a liberal education prepares for actual life,

it develops spiritual qualities,

and includes all training useful for life.
Synthesis of erudition and mental discipline.
Synthesis of extreme views as to power of education.
Result of syntheses. ......

Education aims at full personality : . . .

character is the core of personality ;

it does not always coincide with reputation ;

growth of personality is organization of life. .
Man's ultimate end is spiritual. ....

46
49
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58
60

65
68

71
77
82

83
84

87
89
91

CHAPTER III

SYNTHESIS OF LIBERTY AND AUTHORITY

The concept of freedom needs analysis. .... 94

Both freedom and authority are necessary in life ; . . 97

they are opposed only when conceived negatively ; . 100

neither is then educative. ...... 103

Positive freedom is related to purpose, . . . . no

and is progressive in life ; . . . . . .111

it is increased by acceptance of physical laws, . . 112

and by human co-operation, . . . .113

which implies acceptance of human constraint ; . . 114

it involves control over impulse, . . . . .116

which is attained through membership of society ;. . 117

it is trained through educative authority. . . .119

CONTENTS

XI

CHAPTER IV

WHAT ARE THE MEANS?

Education guides the immature life. .
The child needs direction and guidance.
Obedience should lead to acceptance of law

it is not the same in school as in family

but should always be based on trust.
Guidance should direct free effort ;

guidance in conduct and in learning are inseparable.
In every subject knowledge may be real or verbal.
Education should cultivate habit of work ; .

constructive work responds to need for activity.
Class opinion influences attitude towards studies. .
Method of learning is relative to conception of knowledge.
Schools for working classes should meet needs of those classes.
Middle class schools should be of various types.
Higher class schools should be related to modern conditions.
Girls' schools should not neglect training for home life.
Specialization should be relative to object sought. .
Examinations limit freedom and encourage verbalism, .

but should test power. .....

Method should not be stereotyped ; . . . .

authority has a place in teaching.
Tests of educative means. ......

PAGE
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146

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180
183

CHAPTER V

WHO ARE THE AGENTS.?

The influence of education is limited. .

The great educational agents are communities.

The family is the primordial educator,

and moulds the general spiritual life.
The citizen's relations with the State are organic,

and are closest with his own class.
Diverse views have been held as to State action in education
A national system of education is one which meets all needs.

184
185
186
190

•93
198

200
20;

Xll

CONTENTS

The Church's functions in education are spiritual,

with these the State should not interfere ;

religious education is more than instruction.
The school connects family and State ;

it should gain the children's co-operation ;

its work should win public approval : .

different types of school are needed.
The State should secure qualified teachers ; .

teachers need training in both theory and practice
Administrators should be prepared for their work.

Index. ........

PAGE

21 I

216
218
229

235

237

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251

CHAPTER I

THE END RULES THE MEANS

"What education is, and how the young should be
educated, are questions that require discussion. At
present there is difference of opinion as to the subjects
which should be taught ; for men are by no means in
accord as to what the young should learn, whether they
aim at virtue or at getting the best out of life. Neither
is it clear whether education is more concerned with intel-
lect or with character. And the question is brought no
nearer solution by reference to the actual practice of
contemporary education : no one knows whether the
young should exercise themselves in those studies which
are useful in life, or in those which tend towards virtue,
or in those of essentially theoretical interest. All these
opinions have found supporters. Furthermore, there is
no agreement as to the means of cultivating virtue ; for
different people, starting from different conceptions of
the virtue which all respect, naturally differ as to how the
practice of it should be cultivated." ^

So wrote Aristotle more than two thousand years ago,
and in our own day his remarks are as truly descriptive
of current opinions as they were m his own. Now, as
then, there is no general agreement as to what is meant
by education, for there is no agreement as to its aim.
^ Aristotle : Politics^ v. (viii.) 2,

W. A

2 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION ?

Learning for its own sake, acquisition of knowledge and
skill likely to be useful in life, training in morality,
development of individuality ; each has its advocates.
Nor are those advocates tolerant of each other's views.
A liberal education is often opposed to a utilitarian train-
ing, a primary reference to the needs of adult life is
contrasted with the immediate requirements of child
nature, and though the upholders of each may grant the
importance of moral goodness, none of them seems
prepared to make this the determining factor in the
educative process.

Now it may be granted that some of these divergencies
of view are due to differences in the use of the term
' education.' In every-day speech the work of educa-
tion is commonly narrowed down to scholastic influences,
and a person who has been to good schools and to a
university is termed an ' educated ' man, while one who
has not enjoyed such means of culture is styled ' unedu-
cated.' Yet it is matter of common knowledge that the
latter may admirably fill his sphere in life, and the former
may egregiously fail to do so, and that, moreover, such
instances are not uncommon. " Many members of the
middle and upper classes are too badly educated for any
sort of work, whilst very many poor people are splendidly
educated in subjects which seldom figure in school
curricula, such as horse-management, farming, fishing,
machinery, traffic, making a little go a long way." ^

In this sense, then, a good ' education ' has been
of little real service to the one, nor has a defective
' education ' been a serious obstacle to the other. Such
a result condemns this narrow use of the term. More-
over, it is generally recognized that influences other than
* Reynolds and Woolley : Seems So ! ch. 20.

THE END RULES THE MEANS 3

those of school are brought to bear upon the young, and
that they are too powerful to be neglected in practice.
But they are not usually as carefully organized and
systematically exerted as are those of school, nor are
they commonly treated with the same care in works on
education. So that, neither in theory nor in practice
are they recognized as inevitable educative forces.

The first point, then, to be made clear is that education
is not a matter for schools and universities exclusively,
but that it includes every purposive human influence
brought to bear upon the young. It does not seem that
the term can legitimately be extended further, so as to
include every influence on the developing life ; for it is
only conscious efforts that can be brought under rule
and deliberately arranged with the aim of securing a
certain desired result. It may, then, be urged that the ]
greatest educational reform needed in our day is the more (
explicit practical recognition by parents and others in \
charge of children of their own inalienable educative j
responsibility, and of the limitations both of the '
responsibility and of the power of school.

When once this is clearly seen it is evident that many
of the current disputes about the aim of education are
directly concerned with the aim of school work, and only
indirectly with the nature of that fuller preparation for
life which is included in the wider and more accurate
use of the term. Not that the two are theoretically
separable. Into a complete conception of education
the work of school enters as an important factor, and
one causally related to the end sought by the whole
process. But in practice the separation is possible, and
not infrequently actual. Many parents have but a
vague idea of what they desire their children to become,

4 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION ?

and an equally indefinite notion of what the school to
which they send them is seeking to accomplish. They
accept the school and its work conventionally, or they
regard its province as narrowly utilitarian, thus implicitly
denying its full educative function. On the other hand,
the school is liable to be influenced by tradition or by
1 passing fashion rather than determined by a philosophical
/ conception of its real work and aims. So it may happen
I that parents and school are out of harmony, and, in conse-
quence, that these two great sets of educative forces to
some extent neutralize each other.

That the work of every school is in relation to the
lives of many families with more or less divergent aims
for their children makes it impossible that the desired
harmony should ever be more than wide and general.
But such harmony as is possible is certainly desirable,
and it can be reached only through a growing appre-
hension of the true meaning of education, and of the
relative educative functions of family and school.

When it is recognized that some of the current dis-
putes about education are not really concerned with the
process as a whole, but only with that part of it which is

f undertaken by schools, one cause of misunderstanding
is undoubtedly removed. But the question then arises
as to whether these differences of opinion as to what the
schools should aim at doing are not expressions of yet
more fundamental divergencies as to the general aim of
education, and not mere disagreements as to means.
i It may be generally accepted that what is done in
school is instrumental, and that the wider ultimate aim
must be sought in the whole of life. But this at once
raises the question as to the relative worth of the various
aims and diverse forms of human endeavour, and men

THE END RULES THE MEANS 5

diiFer now, as they have always differed, in their estimates
of these. Nor is this difference merely a practical one,
due to divergencies in religious, political, or social,
conditions. It is deeper than that. It is a difference/
as to the ultimate meaning of life itself ; as to what/
constitutes the real good of a human being — the
summum bonum for which human nature itself deter-
mines men to strive in proportion as they apprehend it.
Is that ultimate aim the closest possible union with God,
shown in a life of loving obedience to divine commands
authoritatively enounced ; and, if so, what are the com-
mands, and how, when, and through what channel, have
they been revealed ? Or is it the service of our fellow
men ; and, if so, is that service due equally to all man-
kind, or especially to such a limited portion of it as the
state or organized community in which one lives, or to
the yet narrower circle of relatives and friends ; and, in
either case, is the service best rendered by working
directly for men's spiritual uplifting, or for the ameliora-
tion of the material conditions of their lives ? Or is it
the perfection of our own individual lives ; and, if so,
is that perfection to be sought in the cultivation of all
our capacities, or in the deliberate suppression of some
for the sake of others.'' Or again, should we place our
own happiness as the goal of our endeavours ; and, if so,
will it be found in the efficient exercise of our powers,
in absolute submission to a conceived law of duty, or
in the enjoyment of the greatest number of agreeable
experiences possible to us, evaluated solely by their
durability and intensity.''

According to the answer given to such enquiries as
these must be the conception formed of the aim which
conscious educative effort should set before itself, and,

6 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

consequently, the nature of that effort, and the emphasis
laid on the various factors which by general agreement
are included in the educative process. For, whatever is
in dispute, all agree that the work of education is meant
to be formative. Even the most strenuous advocates of
free spontaneous development conceive that development
as determined by various reactions on its activity, and
though they exclude those of frankly exercised authority,
they admit those of carefully planned experiences.

Educative effort, therefore, is of necessity related to
the end sought, and all theory of education is an attempt
to lay down general principles of such effort. Like
ethics, it has a practical outlook, and its interest is by
no means abstract and speculative. Its connexion with
.practice is of the closest. In all educative effort the
opinions held by the educator as to the aim of education
* and the relative values of life's activities are operative,
though often unconsciously. If those theories of life
are confusedly and vaguely apprehended, embracing,
it may be, incompatible elements, then the effort is
wanting in definiteness of aim, and is to that extent
doomed to sterility. If they are held clearly, the result
gained may be expected to approximate in general
character to that sought, for on the growing life a con-
tinuous and consistent force has been brought to bear,
and what external influences are capable of accomplishing
they may be expected to accomplish.

But till agreement has been reached as to the real
meaning and end of life it is vain to expect that the same
conceptions will be operative with all educative agents.
The work of each school of thought, and, to a less extent,
of each individual educator, will embody principles
related to the doctrine of life accepted, and these,

THE END RULES THE MEANS 7

ultimate and hidden beneath the surface though they be,
determine the form and the force given to each set of
influences brought to bear. Analysis can only yield
those principles. So that it is vain to hope that by '
inductive enquiries into actual educative work, similar
to those which have yielded such marvellous results in
physical science, ultimate and unvarying laws can be |
reached.

The laws of the physical world are invariable, and
are found indifferently exemplified in phenomena of the
same kind, however externally diverse these may appear
to common observation. The facts of astronomy em-
bodied the same law when interpreted by the Ptolemaic
as when thought under the Copernican theory. The
facts were given to human investigation, and the law
which always existed in them had to be found. But in
educative practice there are no facts in which works an
immutable law, whether it be understood or misunder-
stood. That there may be such laws of human conduct
need not here be questioned. All theories of ethics are
endeavours to formulate them. Doubtless, it may be
urged that all human success, and all human failure, if
we rightly apprehend in what success and failure consist,
are positive and negative means of verifying hypotheses
of such laws. Were these reached, the principles of
sound education could be deduced from them. But an j
inductive enquiry into actual educative practice cannot 1
lay bare more than the actual human purposes which '
inspired it. Behind these it cannot get, and so it cannot
lead us to ultimate principles of life by which to evaluate
them. The facts involve the purposes, and these are
relative to the ultimate view of life which is matter of
dispute and disagreement.

8 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION ?

We cannot, then, find in an examination of the
processes and results of different forms of education,
related to different purposes, any unambiguous and
universally accepted principles, nor a verification of any
hypothesis which will be convincing to those who do
not accept as ultimate the view of the relative values
of the activities of life on which that hypothesis is based.
At first sight there may seem to be agreement. We are
all ready to acclaim Rousseau when he says "To live
is the trade I would teach him," ^ or to accept the more
modern formula that through life education trains for
life. But immediately a definite meaning is given to
' live ' and ' life ' the unanimity vanishes, and we find
we are as far as ever from an unquestioned principle.
The agreement was only superficial and verbal ; the
difference remains real and fundamental. From its very
; nature as purposive human effort education is essentially
I teleological, and until there is universal acceptance of
\ one and the same end, it is hopeless to expect a real
' consensus of opinion as to the means, and evidently
useless to seek unquestionable principles by an inductive
examination of actual educative practice.
, Leaving, then, the work of the educator, may we hope
■ to reach ultimate principles by investigation of the other
factor in the process — the young who are being edu-
cated.'' That we have here something more analogous
* to the facts of the physical world is obvious. But the
' analogy is not at all perfect. The physical facts are
essentially unaffected by human action ; man's purposes
make no change in their nature. But the only young
people available are evidently those who are being
educated under one or other principle ; that is to say,
^ Entile, liv. i.

THE END RULES THE MEANS 9

whose lives are being determined to some extent by
educative purposes. Even here, then, we cannot escape
from the same confusion of purposes which balks the
other line of attack. Nor could we reach any ultimate
purpose were it not so, for no purpose could be found
in facts in which no purpose is embedded.

In short, as no process which is not teleological is, in
any rational sense of the word, educative, it follows that
the one true theory of education can never be reached
inductively from the facts of education, whether they be
examined from the side of the educator or from that of \
the educated. Now, as in the time of Aristotle, it must
be granted that there is no theory of education so
demonstrably true that it must needs be accepted by all /
competent thinkers on the subject.

But, granted that we cannot inductively so determine
the end that all educators will consciously seek to pro-
mote the same evaluation of the activities of life, may i
it not at least be hoped that a doctrine of means may be
worked out, in which each educator may find help and
guidance in attaining his own preferred end.^ Such a
doctrine would have three main branches — the efforts of
the educator, the possible responses of the educated, and
the relations between the educator and the educated that
determine which of the possible responses of the latter
are actualized.

No one will deny that in all these directions we have
some knowledge, or that in all of them that knowledge
is deficient both in fullness and in precision. But where ,
knowledge has entered it can advance. There is here,
then, a vast field for enquiry, and one which, if properly
cultivated, may be expected to yield a copious harvest.
But success in the work depends upon a clear recognition

10 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

of its difficulties, and of the limitations of its scope.
Such limitations cannot be positively laid down before-
hand, but negatively it may be pointed out that a vast
amount of time and labour may be wasted in the accumu-
lation of records utterly worthless because made by
those whose pertinent knowledge and insight are not
sufficient to apprehend truly what the facts really are, or
what is their bearing on the problem in hand.

Assuming that the end is determined, and so putting
it on one side for the present, it is evident that the
problem of means is that of the influence of educative
agents upon those who are to be educated. It is, thus,
essentially psychological. But its basis is not to be
found simply in the psychology of child-life as it would
unfold if left to itself to react spontaneously upon its
physical and human surroundings. Its problems are
concerned with influences intentionally brought to bear
so as to modify and determine that natural growth. It
is a psychology of interaction, and therefore must take
account of the spiritual life of the educator as well as that
of the educated, and must so understand the relation
between them that they are seen as correlative factors
in one process. What is commonly known as ' child-
study ' can, then, by itself only indirectly throw light
upon the practical problems of education. It seeks to
know more exactly the whole spiritual life of the
developing human being, and in that way it contributes
much that is valuable. But it does not confine itself
to the child's response to educative eflbrts, nor, when
those efforts come into its purview, does it consider more
than the child's reaction to them. It is thus at once
more extended in scope, and more limited in analysis,
than a full psychology of educational means demands.

THE END RULES THE MEANS 1 1

Consequently, if the results of investigation into child
psychology be taken simply and without enquiry as basis
for educational theory or practice, distorted doctrine and
mischievous practice are likely to result. It must be
borne in mind that education is intended to be forma-
tive, and that in all formative work the nature of the
agents and their effect on the material to be formed are
as essential items of knowledge as is the nature of that
material itself.

Further, all sides of the enquiry are faced by all
the difficulties of psychological investigation. We are
really in the position that our knowledge of the forces we
are to bring to bear, and of the results they may effect,
is very insecure, and little better than more or less
intelligent guess-work. Our knowledge of ourselves is
not intuitive, and though it is direct yet, even in its
most complete form, it is imperfect, fragmentary, and
marred by various forms of self-deception. Of the
spiritual reality of others we are directly aware : we can
feel ourselves in close and sympathetic accord, or in
instinctive dissonance, with them. But of the actual
content of their thoughts, of the desires and aspirations
which govern their lives, our knowledge is indirect.
They are manifested in various forms of bodily action
and behaviour, and these alone are open to the direct
observation of others. From them the contents of the
spiritual life have to be inferred, and all such inference
is ultimately based on analogy with what we believe of
our own spiritual lives. Evidently, the extent of the
relevancy of this to the spiritual life we are studying
through its means cannot be exactly determined.
Especially when the life we are trying to understand
differs from our own in important points — such as age,

12 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

sex, social atmosphere — are we liable to err in our con-
clusions, even with individuals we know best. Nor are
such errors to be eliminated by generalization, for we
have no grounds for assuming that they are such as
negative each other. As has been said, such knowledge
is not unattainable. To assert that would be to deny
the possibility of any understanding of others, and,
consequently, of all human intercourse. That insight
into the general laws of human life and of human
development is slowly increasing is true. That it can
ever attain absolute certainty is, at best, problematical.
And, whatever want of certitude attaches to knowledge
of those laws attaches of necessity to the principles of
educative means based upon them.

The first essential then of an investigator into such
educational questions is as complete and accurate a know-
ledge as he can gain of the springs and checks of his
own spiritual activities. Until this is attained his
objective enquiries into the mental lives of others have
no claim to be accepted as what he assumes them to be.
And, evidently, there can be no safe inference as to the
action of the educator's spiritual life on that of the
educated until the forces operative in both are appre-
hended with tolerable accuracy. The task is not
hopeless, for the simple reason that the desired know-
ledge is, to various extents, implicitly held in a practical
form by all of us. We call it tact. The difficulty is
not so much the practical one of exerting influence on
others, as the theoretical one of making explicit the
principles implicit in such exercise of influence, so that
they may be a general guide. That is why we want a
theory of education at all. The means of influence
which we find successful with one may be quite inefl^ec-

THE END RULES THE MEANS 13

tive with another. That is the defect of empirical
knowledge, possessed only in the form of practical skill :
we cannot be sure when and in what circumstances it is
rightly applicable.

The general intercourse of life has always cultivated
such practical knowledge, and in many cases to a degree
of great effectiveness. From thought on this general
experience, has been developed such theory of educa-
tional means as we possess. Qualitatively it is of
considerable extent and definiteness. But it does not
show that quantitative precision which the physical
sciences aim at attaining. In those sciences absolute
agreement by competent observers is required, and,
sooner or later, attained ; in them hypothetical laws can
be brought to the test of fact and verified, modified, or
rejected, and here again agreement is rightly assumed
to be both possible and necessary. It may not be
reached at once, but the way to it is plain : it is through
precise apprehension of effects, and comparison of these
with the results calculated as the necessary outcome of
the assumed laws. The whole process involves the
application of exact units of measurement, independent
of the idiosyncrasies of the observer. By experiment —
or observation under carefully prepared and exactly
known and measured conditions — the application can be
made more and more precise.

To attempt to apply the special methods of physical '
science to the determination and measurement of the
spiritual life is an attractive idea. Were it possible, it
would appear that not only would our psychology become
more exact, but that the uncertainties of the theory of
educational means would be continuously reduced, till,
perhaps, they would vanish away. No wonder that

14 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

many enthusiastic workers have taken up the task.
Undoubtedly the general inductive method of observa-
tion, hypothesis, deduction and verification of results, is
equally applicable to psychical as to material facts ; to
questions of will as to questions of gravitation. So long
as this method is applied with due regard to the special
nature of spiritual life, the enquiries undoubtedly pro-
mise well. But in so far as differences of fundamental
importance are ignored, the results obtained are likely
to be illusory.

Now, the assumption that physical methods can be
applied in their fullness to the investigation of the
spiritual life ignores such a difference. All students of
the material world agree with Herschel's assertion that
numerical precision is the soul of physical science. Such
precision is always in view — is always attainable, even
in cases in which it is not yet attained. But the pre-
liminary question whether such precision is a concept
applicable to the spiritual life again leads us to ultimate
philosophical divergencies. Evidently, all that can be
measured by physical means are physical things and
energies, to which physical units can be applied. Unless,
then, it be assumed that there is an exact correlation,
even to the smallest quantitative variation, between
spiritual life and the kinds of sensibility and bodily
activity — generally speaking, muscular contractions —
which can be measured by instruments of precision, the
results of such measurements cannot be accepted as
throwing light on mental life.

On this assumption, however, many investigations
have been made. Their results have shown no general
agreement either among themselves or with common
experience. For example, attempts have been made to

THE END RULES THE MEANS 15

estimate the amount of fatigue by measuring the distance
at which two slight impressions of points of pressure
on the skin can be distinguished as double, assuming
increase of distance to be correlated with increase of
fatigue. But Claparede records such tests on school
children at Berne which yielded the remarkable results '•
that the amount of fatigue at 5 p.m., after seven hours
of school work, was exactly the same as at 8 a.m., before |
that work began, and that after a whole night's rest there I
was greater fatigue than after the mid-day interval of
two hours. ^ Other measurements taken during school
hours, however, " generally show a stronger fatigability
in the afternoon," though investigators are not agreed
as to whether two hours' work in an evening is tiring.^

Sometimes, then, the results of those methods agree
with universal experience though they seem to add
nothing to it, but at other times they appear in flat
contradiction to it. It is not surprising that they are
falling into disrepute among experimental workers.
Schulze tells us: "The indirect methods were intro-
duced by Mosso, who presupposed that muscle power
diminished with the decrease in mental ability. If that
were true, decrease in mental ability could be determined
by the ergograph which measures muscle power. This
hypothesis has been proved to be false. Muscle power
does not decrease in proportion to mental power. It,
therefore, cannot be used as a measure of mental power.
There are cases where decrease in mental ability leads to
increase in muscle power and vice versa.

" Many experimenters made use of tests of the
spatial threshold with the aesthesiometer, going from

'^ Experimental Pedagogy f translated by Louch and Holman, p. 219.
^ Ibid. p. 259.

1 6 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

the supposition that in a state of mental fatigue a judg-
ment of distance must be more inaccurate than in a state
of mental freshness. This method also led to negative
results.

" It does not seem necessary to continue the list of
indirect methods. We must, therefore, give up the idea
of obtaining an exact measure, such as indirect methods
had promised to give us." ^

It is well to relinquish methods which lead nowhere.
But do not these negative results point beyond them-
selves to the falsity of the hypothesis of exact quantita-
tive equivalence between mental and physical energy
which they implicitly assumed.'' Whatever theory of
the relation of mind and body is held, it would seem
that only the crudest form of materialism could justify
such an assumption. If the spiritual be, in every intelli-
gible sense, a delusion, and mental life merely a reflexion
of neural processes, then it might seem admissible to
try to measure these through various forms of muscular
contraction. But on any other theory the assumption
appears quite gratuitous. Even the doctrine of a
thorough-going parallelism between the spiritual and
the neural does not involve the assumption that similar
modes of measurement are applicable to the two. Even
if it be granted that every mental experience is accom-
panied by a neural activity, and, conversely, that every
neural excitation has its correlative disturbance in con-
sciousness, it does not follow that the two are rigidly
related in amount. We know, moreover, that no such
relation exists between the amount of physical stimulus
and that of nerve discharge. In a state of nervous
irritability a very small stimulus, such as a slight sudden
'^ Experimental Psychology and Pedagogy, translated by Pinter, pp. 316-317.

THE END RULES THE MEANS 17

noise, may lead to a violent nerve discharge, while in a
normal state of health the nervous reaction would be
inappreciable, if not absent. Obviously, on any theory
of interaction between mind and body the assumption
of exact quantitative equivalence is even more baseless.
If such theories of the spiritual life as those of
M. Bergson are true, the hypothesis of parallelism must
itself be so profoundly modified as to be really over-
thrown. If the spiritual life has creative energy it is
difficult to see what justification can remain for the
assumption of a quantitative equivalence of physical and
spiritual forces. Lastly, it may be urged that the
hypothesis of such equivalence is open to the fiinda-
mental objection that it is not only unverified but
unverifiable.

It is evident, then, that inferences from the ultimate
external result to the amount of the primary spiritual
energy cannot be accepted as elements in an unassailable
theory. They can, at most, be recognized, and that with
reserve, as indicating a more or less probable tendency.

Indeed, the idea of exact numerical assessment of
spiritual energies seems not only unjustified, but actually
opposed to all we know directly of our own lives. No
one can say, in any but a figurative sense, that at one
time he was twice as angry, or twice as much in love,
or even twice as tired, as at another time. We may know
that one desire is stronger than another, and may find
verification of our estimate in our conduct, or in the
difficulty we experience in restraining ourselves from
following its lead, but we can establish no numerical
scale of degrees of strength. Indeed, so long as we
keep our thoughts fixed on the spiritual alone the very
idea of units and exact measurement appears as inappli-

1 8 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

cable. Our judgements of quantity are all vague, and
even so do not always agree with those of people around
us, as when Sir Anthony Absolute, in a rage with his
son, who is perfectly calm, cries " Can't you be cool like
me?"

Not only is numerical precision in statement out of
reach in psychological investigation but a further
obstacle to scientific assurance is found in the fact that
human beings cannot be sampled as can physical
phenomena. As Mr. Graham Wallas says, " Every man
differs quantitatively from every other man in respect of
every one of his qualities." ^ No conclusions drawn
from even the most careful observations of one set of
individuals can, then, be accepted as more than indica-
tions of probability when we deal with another set, and
can never be regarded as a priori applicable at all to any
particular individual. The ' typical ' or ' average ' child
or man is a mere symbol in a formula, and a symbol
having no determinable affinity with any actual human
being. Nor has this only a practical bearing. By itself
it makes it impossible that in education — as in all else
that regards man's spiritual life — such exactness, pre-
cision, and certainty, can be attained in the statement
of general laws as would reduce the whole process to a
mechanical system in which the outcome of any particular
combination of forces could be confidently calculated.

Quantitative knowledge of mental processes cannot,
then, attain numerical precision, and cannot be held
generally applicable to individuals. Yet that all quanti-
tative results are out of reach is disproved by the fact
that we do continually make quantitative estimates
which are broadly justified by experience. We judge

^ Human Nature in Politics, p. 1 30.

THE END RULES THE MEANS 19

one man to be abler than another, just as we judge him
to be healthier, though neither health nor ability can be
measured in units universally applicable to such forms
of existence. So, too, every teacher mentally arranges
his pupils in a rough order of mental power. Behind
such judgements stand many records of school work well
or ill done, and these of necessity tend to make the judge-
ment narrowly scholastic. The estimates are not based
wholly upon them, for school intercourse gives many
data which cannot be tabulated. Still, so far as the
records of work agree with this wider general estimate
they may be taken as a rough index of power, and they
are evidently applicable to new pupils, and so help to
place them from the beginning. Much attention is
being paid to this question with the aim of finding
simple tests of sufficient scope and variety to class
broadly the mental power of those submitted to them,
and the attempt is both hopeful of considerable success
and full of promise for school organization. Not only
may such tests help in rightly placing new pupils in a
school, but in determining the kind of school to which
a pupil should be sent. Examinations are, of course,
intended to be such tests, but they are far too narrow
in their mental incidence, even when that incidence is not
fundamentally wrong. Scientific enquiry aims at pro-
viding something which will do more surely and more
fairly what examinations so largely fail in doing ; some-
thing which has greater certitude than the results of
intercourse, and does not demand the delay intercourse
necessitates.

The results of satisfactory tests applied to a large
number of individuals may be expected to group them-
selves in a roughly conical form — what Professor Karl

20 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

Pearson calls an " observation frequency polygon." The
greater number would cluster round a kind of mean,
and the number of deviations either by excess or by
defect would roughly be inversely proportioned to their
amount. For those at the bottom of the scale special
scholastic provision is now made : for the most valuable
material at the top the advisability of such provision is
not adequately recognized.

It is by no means easy to determine in what ' general
ability' consists, nor what is its relation to special ability.
Yet its existence is generally accepted as certain. In
whatever branch of human endeavour a man rises to
eminence he would seem to possess power of concentra-
tion and persistence, width of mental grasp so as
intuitively to sum up a situation, and a capacity for sound
and rapid judgement. In that all these seem necessary
to any form of mental excellence they may be spoken of
as * general ' ability. But that any individual who has
attained eminence in one direction could under different
conditions have been equally successful in any other
mode of life seems most unlikely. Simple experience
can, obviously, never decide. It can never show us
whether Napoleon could have written Hamlet, or Shake-
speare conquered at Marengo. But in the extreme
position that the 'hero' is by nature simply a hero in
blank and quite indifferent to the form of his heroism
is implied the doctrine that life is wholly determined by
circumstances, and this pressed to its logical conclusion
would deny his difference from his fellows in quantity
as well as in quality of spiritual endowment. This
doctrine we shall examine later, and offer grounds for its
rejection.

At the same time it may be suggested that it is not

THE END RULES THE MEANS 21

unlikely that the strength of determination towards one
particular kind of excellence is generally proportioned to
its absolute amount, and that the more removed an
individual is from being a genius, the greater is the
adaptability of his mental powers, so that he may do
very well in any one of a fairly wide range of occupations.
This is unlikely ever to reach indifference so long as
any mental power exists at all, for here come in questions
of temperament. A particular boy who may be trained
about equally well in many forms of practical work may
fall far below a corresponding standard in any form of
intellectual work. Tests of ability, therefore, should be
sufficiently varied to cover bias towards each of the great
classes of activity, so as not to rank simply on a one-sided
estimate. It should further be remembered that the
conclusions drawn from such tests are no more than
plausible hypotheses which the actual work of school
and of life will verify or disprove.

On the analogy of the physical sciences it is attempted
to avoid by analysis the difficulties due to individuality.
In physical experiment the more or less perfect isolation
of one particular form of energy gives a result which
may be corrected for other forces known to be in opera-
tion, because the mode of interaction of physical forces
is known and is open to measurement. For example,
the amount of friction which in any given case
interferes with the perfect exhibition of the law of
inertia can be reduced to a minimum, and this can be
calculated both in amount and in direction. But there
is no corresponding mode either of isolating forms of
mental energy or of compounding their results. Atten-
tion, for example, cannot be examined by itself, for as
a separate form of spiritual energy it has no existence.

22 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

and the way in which it is modified by other phases both
of the spiritual and of the physical life, and the extent
of such modification, elude all attempts at exact analysis.
We can seldom secure a correct enumeration of operative
forces, to say nothing of a comparative quantitative
estimate which even approximates certainty. As Mill
long ago pointed out, the co-existence in every actual
piece of life of what we are pleased to style mental
elements, or forms of spiritual energy, is more analogous
to the combination of chemical elements in a com-
pound substance than to the composition of mechanical
forces.

There is the added diflSculty that analysis of mental
life is largely arbitrary and wholly theoretical. If we
seem to have got an element by itself it turns out to be
something very different from what we mean by the
same name in actual life. For example, investigations
are conducted on ' memory ' by the learning to repeat
series of nonsense syllables or of numbers. What light
can such enquiries throw on the power to use past
experiences in dealing with present circumstances.^ In
that power the retention of the past is much more often
seen in an intelligent tendency to think and act than in
that of the recall of particular experiences. And when
it does take the latter form, the experiences are never
disconnected, unrelated, and meaningless. What is
really being tested in these experiments is the effect of
repetition on the formation of physiological habit, not
memory as a force in the intelligent spiritual life. The
man who has a good ' memory ' in the former sense,
indeed, is likely to have a very poor one in the latter —
and that is the only sense in which the power of retention
is of any importance in life or in education. To fill

THE END RULES THE MEANS 23

one's life with the trivial is a most effective means of
hindering the development of intellectual power.

The same is, of course, true of every other form of
mental energy to which a distinctive name has been
given. Their existence as separate ' faculties,' able to
function independently, if not in isolation, has been
rejected from psychological doctrine as untrue to fact and
contradicted by more exactly analysed experience. Does
not the attempt to observe and measure them in isolation
assume this very independence.'' There is, indeed, this
difference, that there seems to be no intelligible limit
to the possible number of these new faculties. Yet,
without artificial isolation no imitation of the methods
of physics is possible ; and such attempted isolation is
worse than futile because it profoundly modifies the
power which is to be examined. No matter how care-
fully results obtained under such conditions are noted,
the combination of them in the explanation of even the
simplest piece of actual spiritual life must remain purely
and arbitrarily hypothetical.

From the standpoint of education, too, all such psycho-
logical enquiries labour under the disadvantage of being
one-sided. They attempt to gain precise knowledge of
the workings of the minds of the persons who are being
experimentally observed. But they do not touch the
other two equally essential sides of the educational
problem, for the tests they apply have small relation to
the actual educative intercourse of life. The knowledge
they attain is of mental life under artificial conditions.
The mental processes observed m a psychological labora-
tory are very different from those with which the
teacher has to deal in school, or the parent in the home.
"The mind as observed in the psychological laboratory

24 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

is a chloroformed and decapitated mind ; the ideal
subject allows his will to be suspended and his emotions
temporarily removed. In the school, however, our
subjects . . . are in full possession of all their faculties.
Laboratory results will no longer enable us to predict
their behaviour. Hence most of the problems hitherto
investigated solely in university laboratories must be
reinvestigated in the schools before the results can be
appropriated with confidence for the theory and practice
of education." Further, " the child to whom we propose
to apply our knowledge is primarily a tangle of impulses
and emotions. Yet the psychology we know is ... a
cognitive or intellectualistic psychology. . . . We have
innumerable studies of tests of intelligence ; but scarcely
a single study concerned with tests of temperament and
character, or, their innate sources, instinct and emotion." ^

The nearer investigations keep to the concrete point
of view, the more fruitful are they likely to be for a
theory of educational practice. Investigations into such
matters as the relative effectiveness of various methods
of teaching particular subjects, of stimulating particular
powers, interests, and tastes, of curbing definite faults
and developing definite merits, may not attain a specious
appearance of exactness of quantitative statement, but
the results they do give are real and directly pertinent.

In reaching even them caution is necessary in drawing
general conclusions. The reaction of different children
to the same influence must be distinguished, and these
divergencies themselves point to further enquiries as to
whether on their basis a grouping round types of suffi-
cient accuracy for the collective dealings to which schools

1 Cyril Burt : Paper read before the Teachers' Training Association,
Mar. 21, 1914.

THE END RULES THE MEANS 25

are, of necessity, largely confined may not be possible.
The question of differences of treatment of such groups
again verges on the disputed realm of ends, but, perhaps,
not so closely as to place a wide general agreement
beyond hope.

In a word, we urge that educational investigation has
aims quite other than those of psychological experiment, /
and that, as a consequence, it should use different means. '
Always the whole process should be observed, and not i
simply the reaction of the persons who are being'
educated. Processes which are not cognate to the edu-
cative influences of actual life are in themselves of no
educational interest, and the attempt to make inferences
from them to actual educative processes is in its essence
fallacious. The problems of education are not those of [
psychology, for they are always those of a conjoint 1
teleological process, and not those of the natural work- ]
ings of individual minds. So, though well-established
results of psychological enquiries may throw light on
one of the aspects of educational investigation, and thus
give valuable hints, they cannot be safely translated at
once into educational terms, or even be accepted as
educational facts. It may be suggested that the neglect
of such considerations can but lead to the elaboration
of much false theory of educational practice, the waste
of much valuable time and effort, and the obscuring of
the real issues — that is, the nature and aims of the whole
process of education.

Further, it must be remembered that the traditional
standpoint of psychology has been individualistic, and
though the enormous task of investigating the psycho-
logy of communities and of the action of the common
mind on individuals has been begun, not much has been

26 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

yet accomplished. This, however, is an aspect of educa-
tion of the greatest importance in practice, and without
which, therefore, every theory of education must be
imperfect. It is true that in the history of education we
may find many examples of educative efforts directed
towards the attainment of definite ends, sometimes
deliberately chosen, often merely accepted as prejudices
from tradition and current custom yet operative never-
theless, and we may judge the general success or failure
of these to attain the end sought. But all enquiry into
I the reasons for success or failure takes us into the realm
I of social psychology, where we find that adequate definite
I knowledge is still wanting to us. And, of course, when
we proceed to compare not only the relative success or
failure in attaining the end sought of different methods
of education in the past, but also their value for the
progress of humanity, we can do so only by reference to
one of the ultimate standards of life, as to which mankind
has reached no universal agreement.

Whether, then, we seek the foundations of a theory
of education in ultimate principles of evaluation of the
activities of life or in exact knowledge of the working
of actual educative efforts in the present and in the past,
nowhere do we find universally accepted and indisputable
doctrine. This by itself is not decisive against the claim
of education to rank as a science. If by a science is
meant a completed body of knowledge, then no sciences
exist ; for even the most perfect, such as mathematics
and astronomy, continually advance and seek to advance.
The claim of a body of knowledge to be termed
' * scientific ' depends on the possibility of sure advance in
systematization, rather than on the point which that
advance has reached. Nobody doubts the existence of

THE END RULES THE MEANS 27

a science of medicine despite the obvious imperfections
of the body of knowledge it includes. Medicine,
indeed, resembles education in the uncertainty both of
its definite aim and of the employment of means, and
knowledge of human physiology is in many respects as
uncertain as is that of human psychology, from which,
indeed, it borrows freely in its treatment of neural
processes. If, then, we may speak of a science of i
medicine we may analogically claim the potential exist- I
ence of a perfect science of education. We can conceive |
of a complete body of doctrine of educative means
affiliated to a universally accepted end, based on exact
knowledge of human intercourse, and continually
verified by the test of educative practice. Such a
doctrine, indeed, would be only a doctrine of tendencies,
for in education we are concerned not with the invari-
able laws of the physical world but with the living realm
of spiritual realities, and, whatever view be taken as to
the ultimate nature of the soul of man, no one is likely
to deny that the results of influences upon it cannot be
calculated with precision.

The more clearly we conceive the possibility of
such a science, however, the more vividly do we
recognize how far the present state of our knowledge
falls short of its realization. Yet, to doubt of the possi-
bility of advance towards it would be to ignore all the
history of the past, and, in the teeth of experience, to
question the possibility of human progress. That
approach may be made towards perfect agreement as to
the ultimate nature of life and the evaluation of its
activities is, indeed, matter of hope rather than of pre-
vision. The day when these essentially metaphysical
questions will be settled by the agreement of all com-

28 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

petent thinkers is certainly not within measurable, even
if it be within conceivable, distance. Till then there will
be as many interpretations of the aim and purpose of
education as there are of the true functions of man and
the real nature of his life. Doubtless, to each thinker
his own theory will appear impregnable ; but he will
win as disciples only those whom he can persuade to
agree with him as to the meaning of life and the relative
values of its activities.

That, from the point of view of human perfectibility,
this is an evil is not clear, so long as it be clearly recog-
nized. The frank discussion of different opinions is the
only way mankind has discovered both of making
individual views precise and clear, and of either rejecting
what on such critical examination is found to be
i\ untenable or of modifying what is seen to err by excess
or by defect. So that, though all may not come to
agreement, yet all may come to see the relations of the
various concepts to each other. Often, as a result,
positions which at first sight had appeared incompatible
are found to be really complementary. Though we do
not clearly apprehend the end, yet the eye of faith may
look forward to the ultimate completion of this process
in the establishment of a truth wide enough and deep
enough to gather into itself all that is true — and there
is surely always something that is true — in all the views
of their destiny which rational men have ever been able
to take.

To ignore or to obscure differences which in our
present stage of thought and knowledge do actually exist
is, however, to oppose a very serious obstacle to advance.
In a laudable haste to establish the claim of education
to rank as a science, it seems to be becoming the fashion

THE END RULES THE MEANS 29

to do this, and to speak of ' the ' theory of education
as if all competent thinkers were agreed on ultimate
principles. This is altogether to be deprecated. It
gives us expositions of practice based upon mutually
destructive principles and so doomed to sterility, and
discussions of novel systems and methods which never
get below the surface. This is assuredly not good for
advance towards the truth. By thoughtful and earnest
examination and analysis of the main forces which educa-
tion can use, with no attempt to cover differences of
meaning by similarity of terminology, advance may be
made ; not otherwise.

The first step forwards would seem to be a frank and .
explicit recognition that on the most fundamental ■
question of aim agreement is not yet possible. The j
same ultimate end will not be sought in all educative '
efforts, and in consequence, the same emphasis will not
be placed on the various educative means.

Next in importance, it may be urged, is an equally
definite recognition of the differences between a science
of education and the physical sciences. The latter are
speculative and abstract, the former is normative and
concrete. The laws of the physical sciences are inde-
pendent of the use to which man may turn his knowledge
of them ; those of education are sought only that they
may be applied, and they have to be sought in activities
in which they are operative, either as consciously sought
aims or as prejudices born from tradition and custom.
They are, hence, doubly hypothetical. There is not
only the causal hypothesis : If so and so be done, a
certain kind of result may be expected ; but also the
teleological hypothesis : If such and such an end be
desired then so and so should be done. A complete

30 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

theory of education would build up a system of hypo-
theses of the former kind in such a way that the com-
bination of all their results would give the content of
the purpose which is the antecedent of the latter.

This brings us to the greatest difference of all between
the physical sciences and education. The former are
abstract, for each is concerned with one aspect of
existence ; but the latter is concrete through and
through. This must be so, or it could not be truly
directive of practice, and it is for the sake of practice
we seek to build it up. It must take account of all
forms of human activity and feeling, of their natural
results, and of the value of such results in promoting
or in marring the form of existence which is accepted
as most desirable. Thus, the ultimate end is concrete,
and the dependent laws of action must be many and
varied.

It is just here that we find the possibility of safe
advance even without preliminary agreement as to the
ultimate end, provided that the relation of all we learn
to such an end be not ignored. The hypothetical laws
of educative means — If so and so be done, such and
such a kind of result may be expected — can be investi-
gated as cases of natural causation. That a life is
influenced in a certain way by a certain agency may be
clearly evidenced by activities of the general nature of
which there is no doubt. That the influence is strong
or weak relatively to the cognate activity of the life
affected may also be established with some degree of
certainty. At present it does not seem safe to go further
in assertion, and it may be suggested that till the whole
field has been well covered in this way there is little call
to attempt to go further.

THE END RULES THE MEANS 31

From knowledge so gained empirical laws of the
operation of spiritual forces may in time be formulated
of much greater certainty, and with much greater pre-
cision, than is possible at present. So is being gathered
the materials for a theory of educative means — a kind
of inchoate natural science of education. Such know-
ledge can only be systematized into a real science of
education — a doctrine of the fundamental nature of a
ideological process — by being related to a definite end
or purpose. In such relation the elementary laws
combine, each in a manner and with a strength deter-
mined by that purpose.

Again, then, it appears that as bodies of systematic
doctrine there must be as many theories — or sciences —
of education as there are accepted ends. But it also
appears that these doctrines largely embrace the same
elements, though related in various ways. These sub-
ordinate elements may be crystallized into axiomata
media — principles which guide practice by setting forth
what results given educative forces may be expected to
attain, but which do not decide anything about the
relative desirability or undesirability of such results.
Such principles may lay down, as the result of knowledge
attained into the actual working of life and its suscepti-
bility to various kinds of influence, general modes in
which spiritual energy may be stimulated and guided.

Even so, only a wide and general validity must be
credited to such principles of practice. Like all
theoretical statements they refer to the usual, and their
aim is to extend that reference to the universal. But
the nature of the case precludes this. An educational
theory which took account only of the forces brought
to bear by the educators would be so one-sided as to

32 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

be false. Allowance must be made for various hind-
rances to the smooth working of the laws of educational
effort, and these hindrances cannot be brought under a
formula ; for individuality cannot be reduced to rule
nor personality to measure. A theory which ignores
this can only be put into practice imperfectly, and that
with the disastrous results which cannot but attend the
carrying into practice of false theories.

Though such a theory can indicate only general forms
of educative effort, it is none the less of considerable
practical value. To grasp general principles vitally, so
that they influence our activities even unknown to our-
selves, is to apply them fruitfully. Especially is this
true in our dealings with our fellows. These are
effective in proportion as they are the spontaneous
outcome of our personalities, and not the artificial — or,
at any rate, exceptional — result of special conscious
effort. He educates the most effectively who can take
his principles for granted, because by previous medita-
tion he has absorbed them into his own soul, and has
by criticism secured that they are both clear and con-
sistent. He fails the most egregiously who has no such
body of consistent principles, and whose influence at
one time neutralizes that which he exercises at another ;
yea, even though he have much skill as an instructor
and a magnetic personality. The magnetic personality
is, indeed, when not inspired by clear principles a
positive evil to those who are influenced by it, for it
transfuses into their souls that very uncertainty as to
the high things of life which detracts from its own
greatness and nobility.

This leads us again to the ultimate nature of the
question of ends. The laws of practice can only become

THE END RULES THE MEANS 33

fundamental principles of education when they are
synthesized into a harmonious body of doctrine by being
related to a definite conception of end. It may be
possible to agree that in such and such ways certain forms
of spiritual activity may be evoked, but whether it is
well to evoke them, and, if so, in what relative strength
and with what purposive reference they should be called
forth, can only be answered on the assumption that one
form of life is higher and better than another.
! To meditate and decide upon the ultimate questions |
of life is, then, the very first requirement of a true ■
educator. Ill as it is for anyone to play with life it is .
infinitely worse for those who deliberately undertake to '
be directive influences in the lives of those younger than
themselves, with whose spiritual oversight they are
charged. That the common details of life in family and
in school tend to make parents and teachers — the two
greatest classes of educators of the young — lose hold
of principles to which they would yet give an academic
consent cannot be denied. Well is it, then, to turn
aside at times to ask seriously " What mean ye by this
service t " and to govern our educative activities by the
answer we can conscientiously give.

If, then, we would at once be accurate in our use of
terms, and avoid both ambiguity and fallacy, we must
confess that there neither exists at present, nor, so far ,
as can be seen, is likely to exist in any proximate
future a theory of education of universally accepted
validity. There are, on the contrary, many theories,
each hypothetically dependent on certain assumptions
which are themselves primarily concerned with life, and
secondarily with education as a training in life. Nor
can such assumptions be excluded. If they are not

34 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

explicitly made in any exposition they are implicitly
operative, and determine both the educational theory
set forth and the practice which embodies that theory,
at any rate in the emphasis laid on different aspects of
the process. Nothing but confusion can result from an
attempt to exclude them. Agreement in natural causal
laws of human influence may blind us to the essential
incompatibility of theories which assume as the aim of
educative endeavour very different views as to the
meaning of life and the relative values of its experiences,
and which, though they use the same means, conse-
quently use them so as to seek different results. The
ultimate question is never how to train, but for what to
train. Unless the former be consciously related to the
latter the practical work of education can only be
ineffective, and the theory which underlies that work
incoherent and self-destructive.

The verification of theories of education — as of all
other hypotheses — must be sought in practice. Here
the approval or justification of the causal hypotheses of
educative influence which form the material for a theory
of educative means is direct and comparatively simple.
Whether or no we approve a result, observation and
experiment can determine whether any suggested means
make for its attainment. But the determination of
whether the kind of life sought as its result in the whole
process of education is good or bad is matter both of
faith and of judgement. Of faith primarily if a divine
revelation of what is best for man be accepted, though
the approval of the judgement must accompany the faith
if it is to be a living influence ; of judgement primarily
if man takes himself and his conscience as the ultimate
measures of good, though, here too, faith that the end

THE END RULES THE MEANS 35

represents the true line of human progress, and so will
win increasingly general acceptance, must also be opera-
tive as a stimulating motive-force.

The first essential, then, in entering on the study of
a theory of education is the recognition that its truth as
a whole is relative to the truth of the view of life it
embodies, and towards the realization of which it points
the way. When this is clear the systematization of the
educative means can be profitably undertaken, and all
that is now known or may hereafter be learned as to the
laws of educative influence and intercourse can be fitted
into a coherent body of doctrine, the application of
which will, at least, be the consistent direction of forces
towards a definite aim, not the fortuitous application of
them according to the caprice or exigencies of the
moment, or in obedience to every new whim of educa-
tional fashion.

CHAPTER II
WHAT SHOULD BE THE END?

As all conscious training of the young is education,
it is a constant process in all human communities. The
race must educate its children, even though it be
uncertain towards what ultimate goal it is training them,
or be unconsciously assuming the validity of incom-
patible evaluations of the purposes and activities of life.
As Herbart remarked : " Education has no time to make
holiday now, till philosophical questions are once for all
cleared up," ^ Indeed, to the ordinary man the discus-
sions of philosophers seem but vain babblings. For him,
* common-sense ' is sufficient, and he does not recognize
how largely this trusted guide of life is composed of pre-
judices and opinions accepted without question because
they are current in the society in which he lives.

So long as thinkers are not agreed on ultimate prin-
ciples it is evident that no thorough-going consistency
can exist in the general mass of received opinions. For
every philosophical theory of life has a basis in the
facts of life, and, consequently, a reflexion in common
opinion. The inconsistencies which thus lurk in
common opinion remain hidden from most minds simply
because no attempt is made to range them under one
ultimate principle. There are maxims and proverbs
"^Science of Education, trans, by Felkin, p. 1 08.

WHAT SHOULD BE THE END? 37

referring to special classes of circumstances and special
kinds of action. But they have been accepted inde-
pendently of each other ; they have never been collated,
and each is called into activity as external circumstances
dictate. So, opinions are confused and conduct is
vacillating : life is governed by expediency, not by
principle. Sometimes, indeed, this is so markedly the
case that it seems impossible to say that the life has a
conscious ultimate end at all.

This would be unfortunate enough if the want of
apprehension as to what life should mean affected only
the individual thus careless of his own welfare. But
" no one liveth to himself alone," in this any more than
in other respects. Our lives affect the lives of others
in proportion to the closeness of our relations with them.
Especially close is the relation of educator and educated.
Especially unhappy, then, are the effects of the want of
a clear and dominating purpose in the life of any
educator. As Richter says : " The end desired must be \
known before the way. All means or arts of education
will be, in the first instance, determined by the ideal or
archetype we entertain of it. But there floats before
common parents, instead of one archetype, a whole ;
picture-cabinet of ideals, which they impart bit by bit ;
and tattoo into their children." ^

This is true not only of parents, but equally so of all
teachers who have given no careful thought to the
meaning and purpose of their work. They may pride
themselves upon being ' practical,' and contemning
' theory.' But a practice which is not oriented towards
a clearly conceived end — that is, which is not inspired
by a living theory — can be only of that uncertain and
1 Levanay p. io6.

38 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

vacillating character which meets each situation as it
arises by what seems expedient at the moment. That
is, indeed, a strange exaltation of the ' practical ' which
condemns practice to be largely sterile and ineffective
because its efforts at one time negate those made at
another.

Without countenancing the absurd claim that con-
scious educative influence is all-powerful in forming the
young, it must be acknowledged that it has considerable
power, and that the unintended formative influence of
the same educators is often yet more potent. So that
the uncertainty of mankind about the really great
questions of life grows out of the educative environment,
and must continue unabated until all conscious educa-
tive effort is dominated by an explicit and self-consistent
purpose. Doubtless, the various demands of life
impose upon all who would train for life many sub-
ordinate purposes, some small and immediate, others
great and far-reaching. It is because these so often act
independently of each other, and are followed without
regard to their relative worth and weight, that so much
of actual education is uncertain in aim, and less effective
in its operation than the efforts devoted to it deserve.

The first thing needful for success is a clearly conceived
theory. Such a theory must lay down explicitly, though
in most general terms, the kind of end to be sought, and,
in relation to that end, examine and try all suggested
means. An investigation of means is not enough ; for,
as has been urged, the results of such an investigation
are inchoate till they are related to this or that theory
of the end. The practical work which is inspired by a
real insight into the values of life is itself living and
inspiring : that which is guided by rules and maxims for

WHAT SHOULD BE THE END? 39

dealing with certain types of situations, but which is
animated by no such living faith, can be but dead and
mechanical. The more highly we estimate the value of
good practical educative work, the more earnestly we
shall desire that it be good as the artist's work is good,
not merely as that of the house-painter is successful.

In a sense, practice cannot be separated from theory,
for every piece of practical work is capable of being
generalized, and, therefore, embodies a general idea.
The next piece of work may embody a conflicting general
idea, and so on, and so on. The work as a whole is then
devoid of explicit theory because it is full of implicit
theories, and these are contrary the one to the other.
The ' practical ' man is not the man of no theory, but
the man of many potential theories : but he has never
thought them out, and so is unaware that they are really
operative in his mind. They are the unrelated pre-
judices— some true, some false — which he has absorbed
from the common mass of opinion about him.

We are by no means asserting that theory and practice
are synonymous terms, nor that they are so indissolubly
woven together that all educators should be equally
proficient and equally interested in both. Some minds
are naturally more inclined to speculation, others to
effective action, and this holds in education as in other
lines of human thought and endeavour. But we do 1
urge that the practical educator should no more neglect |
and contemn theory than the scientific inventor would 1
think of neglecting the results of the workers in pure ■
science. Mechanical invention has made its great con-
quests because the practical workers have learnt from the
speculative thinkers ; have absorbed what these have
established as true, and have set themselves deliberately

40 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

to utilize the laws of nature thus made manifest to
them.

It would be a rash assertion indeed that there has been
an equally revolutionary advance in education. That
such educational appliances as schools and libraries have
been multiplied is true ; that they have exercised more
good influence than is credited to them by pessimistic

■ observers we believe to be true also ; but that the
spiritual lives of men have shown a development com-

f parable in extent and importance to that of the
mechanical means of production and communication
cannot be maintained. We are profoundly convinced
that only when the practical and the theoretical educator
work together — the former guiding his practice by the
truths established by the latter, the latter seeking always
in the work of the former the tests of his hypotheses
till he can mould them into the form of general truths
— will the advance which all desire be made. The
progress will be slow even then, and that just because
agreement has not been reached as to the most funda-
mental principle of all — the ultimate end of the whole
process. The most that it seems possible even to hope
is that earnest and consistent efforts may be made to
realize each ideal aim which, after all efforts at synthesis,
still remains unresolved. Then comparative evaluation
will be more possible than it is at present, when the work
is nearly everywhere more or less vitiated by uncertainty
of purpose.

Eucken well sums up the situation : " Education and
instruction are especially affected by the difficulties that
are engendered by the lack of a main tendency in life. . . .
In conflict with one another we use up much power
without making much progress. . . . We wish to improve

WHAT SHOULD BE THE END? 41

education, and yet we have not come to an understanding
with regard to its ideals, its possibility, and its conditions.
Education must be fundamentally different in character,
according as man is regarded as a particular and
exclusively individual being, or as a being in whom a
new and universal life seems to emerge ; according as
he is only an elevated being of nature or in the highest
degree possible a spiritual being ; according as the higher
proceeds from the lower gradually and surely after the
manner of organic growth, or we must find a new
starting-point and accomplish a revolution." ^

Without attempting to disguise the fact that un-
resolved antitheses as to the end of life do exist among
the most earnest and competent thinkers, and holding
most firmly that such divergencies must affect the theory
and through that the practice of education, yet it seems
possible to make some attempt towards minimizing the
discordances they introduce. For people holding all these
different views live together amicably, engage without
undue friction in the ordinary avocations of life, and
are effective members of the general community. Men
are no longer ostracized because of their religious or
philosophical beliefs. They are accepted and estimated
according to their reputation, which is the opinion their
known conduct causes others to form of their worth.
So that, in some relation to all the current conceptions
of man's highest good, there are intermediate principles
of life which are generally accepted as valid, and which
form the framework of the widest common life in which
we share.

Of these education must take account, and it might
seem plausible — as it certainly would be easy — to urge

'^Life's Basis and Life's Ideal, trans, by Widgery, pp. 3+3-344-

42 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

that from the educational standpoint they may be
accepted as ultimate. But this would be fallacious. It
would assume that education is confined to that training
which can be given in common to any number of
individuals, and that it has nothing to do with the
intimate personal life. For immediately we look below
the widest community we find smaller communities —
a whole hierarchy. And each has its special laws and
principles, some particular to itself, and others which are
more or less serious modifications of the more general
principles of the wider community. So that the
principles current in any given community do not form
a consistent body of practical doctrine. Nor are they
universally accepted by the members of that community.
Some are rejected altogether by those who assume one
estimate of life's values, others by those who hold an
opposed view, while the relative emphasis laid on those
which are nominally recognized by all can scarcely be
the same in any two schools of doctrine. Nothing, we
believe, is to be gained by ignoring such important
actual differences.

On the other hand, much is to be lost by magnifying
them. Many of the divergent views which are advanced
as to the aim of education really relate only to some
subordinate aim, and refer to some of these intermediate
principles of life. On this lower plane they are, indeed,
irreconcilable, but from the higher standpoint of a more
comprehensive view of life's needs and activities they
frequently appear complementary — each true in what it
aflSrms though false in what it seems, explicitly or
implicitly, to deny. Thus, by a process of analysis and
synthesis the number of conflicting voices may be
reduced. Could this be carried far enough the truth

WHAT SHOULD BE THE END? 43

must at last be found, and agreement on the great things
of life be reached. For it must not be forgotten that
on the evaluation of these there is but one truth, which
is wide enough and deep enough to include all the
partial truths which now divide mankind because they
are taken for whole truths. When that far-distant point
is reached human progress will be sure and rapid ; for
it is error and ignorance, and the mistaken and false
action to which they lead, that impede its course.

Man's spiritual life is of a complexity which has
hitherto not yielded wholly to his power of analysis.
Could it be seen clearly and truly in all its aspects and
relations, in its origin and in its destiny, then the recogni-
tion of the nature of its highest good would be com-
paratively easy, and all partial expressions of it would be
seen to be inadequate. Divergence of view as to what
is man's highest good is possible only because our
knowledge is fragmentary and our insight imperfect.
The most opposed views as to life's issues which thinking
men have advanced may be assumed to be true on their
proper planes and in their right relations. Falsity
comes in with exclusion : then partial truth is exalted
into full truth, and one aspect of life given a dominance
which a fuller knowledge would show it should not
possess. To the extent to which we can see such
unjustified limitations we may suggest a synthesis which
would show that doctrines which are antithetical on a
lower plane are really complementary on a higher.

The most evident of the antitheses of life is that
between man's spiritual and his animal nature. Is man
essentially a spiritual being whose earthly life is a
constant struggle with an evil and recalcitrant body in
which he is imprisoned .? Or is the body the real man,

44 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

and is all that we call the mental life only a mode in
which the nervous system functions ?

According to the former view the ideal of life is
asceticism. All bodily appetites, impulses, and pleasures,
are at least suspect. Man advances towards perfection
in the spiritual life in proportion as he becomes indifferent
to all that pertains to the bodily life. Education must
be watchful and repressive, for its function is to help to
subdue all bodily impulses, and to form both the habit
and the desire to repress the natural longings for earthly
joys. Man is born evil, and the true work of this life
is so to free the soul from sin by self-denial that it may
pass purified through the gate of death into a higher
eternal life. In the Brahman seeking Nirvana, and in
some mediaeval ascetic saints, we see this theory of life
put as fully as possible into practice.

On the other view, all the impulses with which man
is born are good because they belong to his physical
nature and their fit satisfaction yields pleasure. The
function of the mental powers is to calculate how the
greatest amount of gratification of desire can be obtained.
To be comfortable is to be good, and prudence is the
highest virtue. Self-restraint is justifiable only when a
present joy would be likely to lead to a greater future
sorrow. All men may not find satisfaction in the same
kind of experiences, but personal satisfaction is the aim
of life.

The former view is idealistic : it seeks man's happiness
and perfection in the future, and imagines then a state
far more blessed than any he has yet attained. The
latter is naturalistic : it seeks happiness and perfection
in the present life. If it be consistent it sets up no
ideals, for to do so would be to detract from the pleasant

WHAT SHOULD BE THE END? 45

complacency of the present, in that it would inspire a
feeling of dissatisfaction and unrest. Education in
harmony with this doctrine is essentially precautionary.
It would guard the child against mistakes in his physical
life, but it would not otherwise interfere with the actions
to which his impulses prompt.

So long as body and soul are regarded as essentially
separate and different modes of existence, only a com-
promise between these views seems possible, and
undoubtedly it is some form of such a compromise
that most lives express. But compromises are devoid
of guiding principle, and in education a compromise
between these two views of life means an alternation of
indulgence and repression, according to temporary
expediency or even caprice.

When, however, this dualism is rejected, and it is
recognized that the life we have to live, and for which
education has to prepare, is one and indivisible ; that
experience is at once physical and mental ; that the
dynamic forces in life are spiritual activities functioning
in a material environment and enabled so to function
because of the bodily organism ; then a reconciliation
and synthesis — and not merely a compromise — becomes
possible. Man's innate impulses result from the long
continued experiences of his ancestors. Some are
survivals from a primitive age and are antagonistic to
social bonds which have been gradually developed during
later times ; others are of more recent origin and prompt
to actions acceptable to current opinion. As the centre
of all such promptings, there is the corresponding
tendency to emotions and feelings which we judge bad
or good. It is not that the body is wholly evil or wholly
good, but that the whole life starts with dynamic forces,

46 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

at once spiritual and physical, making, some for what
we regard as right, and others for what we regard as
wrong. These manifest their presence before the child
is able to form any moral judgement or to accept or
reject any moral rules or principles. If they are allowed
to find scope and exercise each draws into itself
nutriment from the events of daily life, but if any
particular mode of activity is generally prevented that
innate force becomes weaker, at least relatively to others.
It gets, as it were, crowded out of the active life, though
that it is not destroyed is at times manifested unex-
pectedly when some novel situation gives it scope. Just
as, on this synthetic view, the ideal of life is neither
asceticism nor self-indulgence, but a fulfilment of
function which demands at times self-denial but which
yields also much satisfaction, so education is neither
constant repression and direction nor the negation of all
real control and guidance. The rule of synthesis is
given by consideration of the functions to which life
calls, and this involves study of the relations of the
individual to all that exists.

Here we are brought face to face with the second
great antithesis of life — that between the individual and
his environment. Is each man essentially independent
of his fellows and separate from them, so that his varying
relations with them do not change or modify his real
being .'^ Or is his life throughout one of dependence on
surroundings .f* Is the ideal of manhood the self-
sufficing individual, or the constituent of society whose
life is absorbed in the common life.'' Egoism and altru-
ism are the two moral poles of this antithesis. In theory
the former counts the rights and the good of others as
of no great account in so far as they conflict with the

WHAT SHOULD BE THE END? 47

well-being of the self, while the latter holds self to be
but as dust in the balance in comparison with the
common good. It may be doubted whether any life
was ever so consistently governed by either egoistic or
altruistic principles that regard to others in the one case,
or to self in the other, was entirely excluded ; but it is
notorious that many have approached the former ideal,
and a far smaller number the latter.

Each principle again appears defective immediately
it is considered, for experience teaches that on the one
hand we are all responsible persons, each with his own
life to lead, and also that that life is in constant relation
to others at innumerable points, or, in other words, that
individuality and human relationships are inseparable.

Still, this does not take us beyond a compromise.
Now we serve self, now others ; and, according to our
temperament, the one or the other service is rare in our
lives, determined probably by passing mood or by some
extraneous circumstance, but in no sense by consciously
accepted principle. Such a compromise can give no
definite educative guidance, and evidently can only pro-
mote a similar spirit of expediency in those thus trained.

If a reconciliation is to be found, it must be
sought in a deeper analysis of human experience and
human needs ; for the true end of human life must be
human life in its fullness and in its perfection. Such f
an analysis soon lays bare the truth that we live in j
essential inter-relations with both our human and our |
physical surroundings. We cannot conceive of our- ';
selves apart from our thoughts, our desires, our know- ;
ledge, our estimates of value ; for they are the very
material of our spiritual lives. But in all these we are
what we are because we have been born and have lived

48 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

in a certain time and place, and among a society that has
attained a certain stage of civilization and holds certain
views and beliefs. These we insensibly receive into our
minds in our intercourse with men, through the speech
and acts which assume them. All life is social through-
out. We seek our own good, and we derive the idea
of what is good from our social circle, and in labouring
to attain our end we are helped or hindered by others,
we affect them for good or ill. A wholly individual
morality is a contradiction in terms. It follows that
goodness and wisdom are inseparable. It is want of
insight into the real nature and conditions of good that
leads to opposition and to failure, for the good is uni-
versal in that it is the perfection of human nature as
such, the true ideal for all men. The more a man is
truly good, the more he is truly wise, for the more he
realizes that the lives of others are an essential part of
his life, and that he lives his own life ever as part of the
common life. As Mr. Bradley sums up the matter :
" In short, man is a social being ; he is real only because
he is social, and can realize himself only because it is
as social that he realizes himself." ^ And, on the other
hand, " Only by the will of its self-conscious members
can the moral organism give itself reality." ^

Similarly the inter-relation of our lives with our
physical environment is not accidental and changeable
at will, but essential and determinative. In thought we
can separate the knowing and desiring mind from that
which it knows and desires. But the separation is only
in our analysis. The resolution of the antithesis of
mental and physical life supplies the key to the resolution
of that of self and its material environment. Spiritual
'^ Ethical Studies, -p. 158. ^ Ibid. -p. 147.

WHAT SHOULD BE THE END? 49

activity acting on nothing is a contradiction in terms ;
matter on which no spiritual activity can be exercised
simply does not exist for us — is not part of our world.
Our environment is the matter of our thoughts, our
thoughts give the form in which we apprehend our
environment.

Is, then, a scientific knowledge of the universe an
adequate ideal purpose for human life and endeavour.?
This seems to be the creed of rationalism, or the theory
that reason is adequate to the solution of all the problems
of life. Now, reason cannot advance unless it assume
as a postulate that law is universal and inviolable. But
the only laws it knows are those of the physical universe.
It can, then, only think of the spiritual life in terms of
those laws, and hold that if fully known they would
furnish a sufficient explanation of it also. In man, such
laws are evidently primarily applicable to the function-
ings of the nervous system. It follows that the whole
of these must be regarded as mechanically determined.
Thus an account is given of the whole of the bodily life,
and this must sufficiently cover the whole of the life of
thought as well, unless some forces and laws unknown
to physical science be assumed. It would seem, then,
that a really consistent and thorough-going rationalism
finds its logical goal in materialism.

Is, then, materialism the ultimate explanation of the
world.'' To a critical analysis its inadequacy soon
becomes apparent. It makes man's activity consist of
reactions and interactions of irresistible forces acting in
immutable laws. Man appears, indeed, to live, but what
he calls life is in its essence one with the workings of
inanimate nature. For some inexplicable reason some
of these processes are accompanied by what we call con-

50 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

sciousness — thought, desire, volition, and the like. But
this makes no difference to the course of things.

It is here that materialism breaks down. It fails to
satisfy even the demands of that reason from which it
springs, for its solution of the problem of human life
omits to take account of one of its obvious factors. It
is surely unreasonable to suppose that reason itself is a
phantasmagoria ; that its very claim to decide on the
nature and purpose of life is vain, because what we call
our trains of thought and our conclusions are really
nothing but shadows thrown by material processes which
go on quite independently of the consciousness which
accompanies them.

Materialism, therefore, fails to account for our
intellectual life. But this carries with it the failure to
explain the ultimate nature of the physical world. For,
as has been seen, in our experience — of which material-
ism itself is a part — the concrete activity which exists is
at once ourselves and our surroundings. It is human
thought which assumes the laws which are operative in
the physical world ; it is human ingenuity which brings
those assumptions to the test of further human experi-
ence. The material construction of the universe, then,
must be ultimately a spiritual construction, if human
thought be a spiritual reality and not a shadow of
material processes. But a spiritual construction can be
a true account of a material universe only if that universe
be itself the expression of a spiritual activity. Spirit
can enter into spirit, and the laws discovered by spiritual
activity must be themselves the manifestation of spiritual
activity.

If, then, the position that ultimate existence is
material be rejected it must be accepted that around and

WHAT SHOULD BE THE END? 51

beyond us is a spiritual existence which cannot be sub-
sumed under physical laws and categories. So we are
led back to the antithesis between the material and the
spiritual with which we started. Now, however, it is
extended from the brief and narrow life of the individual
man to all time and all existence. It, therefore, presents
to us the same desires and aspirations on a grander scale ;
and an adequate theory of human life and destiny must
provide for their satisfaction. But no matter how com-
pletely science may succeed in accounting for the inter-
action of physical forces — yea, even if it could set before
our reason arguments in which we could see no flaw
to prove that the whole material universe has been
thus explained — the yearnings of the heart remain
unsatisfied. Materialism still fails as an ultimate theory ;
for such a theory must find the completion and perfection
of man's nature in his relations to that greater life and
power which surrounds him, and which animates and
directs all things. A self-originated, self-contained,
and self-sustaining, mechanism, making for nothing but
its own conservation, devoid of all we call life, is not
an object of love or of aspiration. But with a theory
of spiritual existence — a fount of creative power — all is
difi^erent. Man's relation to such existence is not
limited by what he can prove on the assumption of fixed
laws of the interaction of matter — laws which, he feels,
do not touch the real springs of his own deepest life —
but gives scope for hope and faith and love. So, in it,
not our reason only, but the whole of our spiritual
aspirations, can find fruition.

Of these spiritual needs the deepest is that the
self should be carried out of the narrow limits of its
immediate personal interests in love for what is deeper

52 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

and wider than it. Such loving aspiration is not centred
in the gratification of merely personal desire ; it seeks
not its own glory. Without it, there is no real reaching
forward to an ideal ; for an ideal which is only a picture
of the imagination, or a plan approved by reason, counts
for but little in life. Love of what is beyond ourselves
is the central spring of life, the invigorating spirit of
purpose and effort.

Can all this be found in a ' religion of humanity ' —
a faith in the continuous progress of mankind towards
human perfection, which is not merely a belief but a
spring of action.? To a few souls this may appear
sufficient. They are content to find that immortality
which man so naturally — if not universally and instinc-
tively— longs for and expects, in the survival of the race
and the annihilation of the individual. They unselfishly
strive for all that they believe will make for human
progress. But to most of us such an ideal is unsatisfy-
ing. We find little comfort or help in the thought of
relation to an existence, wider it is true, but of the same
faulty nature as our own ; for we cannot hide from our-
selves that not all human faults are merely negative
imperfections which progress may remove. Even a
slowly improving humanity does not prove a sufficient
inspiration for our efforts. We are apt to ask why
the problematic improvement of future generations,
equally ephemeral with our own, should be held a
sufficient reason why we should deny ourselves what
seems a present obvious and certain good or delight.

Nor is sufficient inspiration to be found in any abstrac-
tion, such as Kant's categorical imperative. A self-
supporting law of duty, which gives no reason beyond
itself why it should be obeyed and appeals to the

WHAT SHOULD BE THE END? 53

individual conscience for approval may commend itself
to the reason, but can scarcely touch the heart. More-
over, putting on one side the notorious fact that the
rulings of conscience are not uniform, there remains the
question why conscience should be obeyed when it
formulates its rules or enounces its decisions in harmony
with its interpretation and application of the abstract
law of duty. Conscience is no more intimate a part of
myself than are the impulses it bids me control or even
inhibit, so that justification of its claim to govern my
life must be sought outside my life. Nor can we find
an adequate basis by relating it to the common opinion
around us. We should not feel it right to change our
moral rules of life if we changed our residence to a
country where other prmciples of conduct receive accept-
ance. Nor, indeed, can we say with certainty what the
rules of conduct which are verbally current around us
actually mean. Men differ in their interpretation of
the terms in which they are expressed, even when they
agree in accepting them in some sense. And, as we have
seen, there is no unanimity in such acceptance. So,
from the kaleidoscope of common opinion no clear ideal
of life or sure principles of conduct can be drawn.

We must, then, seek the justification for rules of life
and for efforts to live virtuously in a relation of con-
science to an existing perfection of truth and goodness.
And this relation must be one of the whole self, and not
of reason only. In a word, it must be personal, for we
cannot love a mere abstraction. Love needs a personal
object, and its relations with that object are just as
surely part of the warp and woof of life as are the more
obvious relations to things and men to which science
is restricted. This relation is of the essence of religion,

54 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

and so, in the attempt to analyse the needs of the spiritual
life of man, we are led to the old position that religion
is the ultimate bond which unites the whole ; for only
in the religious relation of love can the deepest longings
of the human heart be satisfied. In the words of an
old writer : " Man was created, not for food, clothing,
and habitation, not for difficult, hidden and troublesome
knowledge, but for the desire to know God more truly,
for a participation in eternity, and in His divine
nature." ^

Relation to God is the only way in which we can
conceive the satisfaction of human aspirations, the com-
pletion of human knowledge, the sanctification of human
life. Then " the ideal is an universal, because it is God's
will, and because it therefore is the will of an organic
unity, present though unseen, which is the one life of
its many members, which is real in them, and in which
they are real." ^ If this be accepted, and if it be agreed
as a corollary that religion is the core of worthy human
life, it follows that true education is, before all else,
religious. This, of course, does not touch the question
as to where and by whom such instruction in doctrine
as may be regarded as a necessary part of a religious
education should be given. Religious education is
primarily concerned with an attitude of mind — a
direction of the will and a trend of the emotions — and
to this instruction of the intellect is auxiliary. Nothing
but disappointment and failure can ensue from a con-
fusion of the two questions of training or education and
instruction, whether it be in religion, in morality, or in

^ J. L. Vives : de Tradendh Disciplin'is, trans, by Foster Watson,
p. 1 8.

"^ F. H.Bradley : Ethical Studies, p. 209.

WHAT SHOULD BE THE END? SS

general activity. It is because schools so often have
made the confusion, and believed they were educating
when they were merely instructing, that they have so
frequently and for such long periods failed to meet the
legitimate requirements of the community.

Here we are led to an educational antithesis which is
an outcome of the differences of view as to what con-
stitutes the perfection of man's spiritual life. Is educa-
tion mainly concerned with intellect or with character.?
The analysis of the personal idealist may be imperfect,
not only in ignoring or under-estimating the natural
bodily life, but also in failing to recognize the value of
some aspects of the spiritual life itself, in which his own
temperament does not lead him to take delight. So he
gives undue dominance to some other aspect. The will,
the intellect, the emotions — each may be exaggerated,
so that the highest good for man is found in individual
freedom, which often shows as self-sufficiency and
assertion ; or in intellectual contemplation of ultimate
truth ; or in ecstatic absorption in love of the good and
beautiful. Now, it would be absurd to deny that in each
of these three directions a point much in advance of
that reached by ordinary men has been attained by
exceptional heroes, thinkers, and saints. Yet in each
it does not seem difficult to see defects ; indeed, the very
brightness of the one set of qualities seems to throw
the comparative lack of others into darker shadow.
And, evidently, each implies at once a degree, and a
one-sidedness, of development which are not common
among men. Few can be heroes or philosophers or
mystics, and, consequently, none of these by itself can
give a complete and general aim for human life. The
fact that individual perfection has been chiefly advocated

S6 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

as the highest good for man by philosophers of intellec-
tual temperament accounts for the predominantly intel-
lectualistic character commonly associated with that
perfection, so that human progress is found in increase
of knowledge, and human greatness is measured by
power of thought.

Such a view is naturally attractive to those whose
occupation is teaching, so that in practice schools have
generally regarded intellectual training as the essential
aim of education, and often have taken little account of
the moral quality of the matter through which that
training was given. On the other hand, thinkers on
the theory of education have, as a rule, taken the view
of Herbart, that " the one and whole work of education
may be summed up in the concept — Morality." ^

Evidently here a reconciliation is needed. A com-
promise which gives intellectual training at one hour,
and religious or moral training at another, does not meet
y the needs of the case. For in life intelligence and
morality are not separable. Good intentions unguided
by sound judgement lead mostly to disaster. A clear
intellect uncontrolled by sound moral principles is a
danger to the community, and may easily be a curse to
its possessor. No doubt, nothing is more common than
an attempt at such separation — religion for Sundays, and
business for week-days — and the term ' business ' is apt
to cover, in a different sense from charity, a multitude
of sins. A religious and moral education is religious
and moral through and through, not because the subjects
studied are all directly religious and moral in their
content, but because they are studied in a religious and
moral spirit. It is not meant simply that they are
^ O/. cit. p. 57.

WHAT SHOULD BE THE END? 57

followed strenuously, but that they are so presented as
to widen the mental outlook and to appeal to the higher
spiritual aspirations — in a word, to help to form spiritual
ideals. All this is religious and moral in the widest sense.

Necessarily, most of the time of the school is given
to intellectual culture — that is its characteristic function
in education. But that would be a very bad school
which paid no regard to morality in conduct, and that
would be a very imperfect education which was obtained
only within the walls of a school. In home training the
question of conduct must always loom larger than that
of knowledge, and no arrangements can relieve the
home of its primary responsibility in this respect. So
far as it fails to fulfil its office the education of its
children is imperfect, and, it may be, all other educative
efforts are rendered abortive. Pestalozzi was pro-
foundly right in putting forward the home as the very
core of educative influence. Any public or private
action which tends to obscure this in the minds of
parents is antagonistic to education, and especially so
when it is taken in the name of education. Further,
in the church or religious organization to which the
family belongs the main aim is religious, and religion is
the only sure basis mankind has ever found for the moral
life of the community. Hence, of the three main
educative communities, two are primarily concerned with
morality, and the third should make it the permanent
undercurrent of its life.

Education, then, is more essentially the cultivation of ,
character than the training of intellect. As Vives put ,j
it : " He who knows none of the arts but yet has a \
practical knowledge of virtue, and has formed and I
ordered his life by its rules, is so far from being blamed *

58 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

that he is deserving of praise. On the other hand, he
is worthy of ignominy and dishonour who is learned and
instructed in human arts, but is destitute of virtue." ^

But morality, in the usual restricted and somewhat
technical use of the term, is not the sole educative aim,
just because such morality is not the whole of life.
Much of our conduct is on the surface morally indifferent.
To make a mistake as to the investment of one's money,
or to advance and try to establish a false hypothesis in
science, is not morally wrong ; nor are the opposites
of these matters for moral commendation. Doubtless
at a deeper level we may acknowledge a moral obligation
to be thrifty and cautious, or to seek the truth, and in
that sense there is a basis of morality in all conduct.
To fulfil properly any of the functions of life demands,
indeed, a moral purpose to do well what has to be done ;
but it demands also an acquired knowledge and skill,
relevant to the task to be performed. Education must
endeavour to cultivate this knowledge and skill as well
as to encourage the growth of right motives and good
purposes. It is not merely the life which is good in
intention, but the life that is also effective in action, that
education should aim at securing.

This leads us to the consideration of the antithesis
commonly assumed in the aims of intellectual training.
Should it seek liberal culture or practical efficiency ? So
far is this antithesis sometimes pushed that a 'liberal
education ' is contrasted with a ' utilitarian training,' and
the extreme advocates of the former seem to regard all
that has a direct outlook on the practical affairs of life
as actually opposed to true education. Thus, Herbart
writes : " Whatever arts and acquirements a young man
^ 0/>. cit. p. 19.

WHAT SHOULD BE THE END ? 59

may learn from a teacher for the mere sake of profit, are
as indifferent to the educator as the colour he chooses
for his coat." ^ Here, we believe, we have another case
of aims which are opposed in a narrow interpretation,
but are complementary in a higher and more compre-
hensive view. Evidently, we must begin by asking
what is meant by ' liberal ' on the one hand and
* utilitarian' on the other.

In his essay Of a Liberal Education^ Whewell takes
as the criterion the extent of intellectual culture. He,
therefore, restricts the term to " the education of the
upper classes ... as alone exhibiting, in any completeness,
the Idea of Education." ^ For he holds that the intel-
lectual content of a liberal education must be so wide
that many years are needed for its acquisition. This
content he divides into " Permanent " and " Progres-
sive " studies. " To the former class belong those
portions of knowledge which have long taken their
permanent shape ; — ancient languages with their litera-
ture, and long-established demonstrated sciences. To
the latter class belong the results of the mental activity
of our own times ; the literature of our own age, and
the sciences in which men are making progress from day
to day. The former class of subjects connects us with
the past ; the latter, with the present and the future." ^

As a statement of the scope of a wide intellectual cul-
ture, this would, we imagine, meet with general approval.
It accords in spirit with Plato's conception of the cul-
tured man as the spectator of all time and of all existence,
who loves and seeks truth, whose v/ell-balanced mind is
not swayed by petty passions because being intent on
the delights of the soul the pleasures of the body are
1 Op. cit. p. 84. 2 pp, 1.2. 3 /^;V. pp, 5.6.

6o WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

of little moment to him.^ But it cannot be granted
that it is sufficient for a liberal education. It looks at
the instrument rather than at the effect of its use. More-
over, in addition to the religious and moral training
which Whewell explicitly omits from his discussion,
there must be included a training of the body. For,
as Plato taught, good education strives " to develop in
the body and in the soul all the beauty and perfection
of which they are capable." ^ More adequate is the
definition of Vergerius : " We call those studies liberal
which are worthy of a free man ; those studies by which
we attain and practise virtue and wisdom ; that educa-
tion which calls forth, trains and develops those highest
gifts of body and of mind which ennoble men, and which
are rightly judged to rank next in dignity to virtue
only." 3

But it is only by implication and indirectly that such
statements have any reference to the conduct which
should be the outcome of the liberally educated person-
ality. Indeed, Sir William Hamilton expressly excluded
such considerations when he wrote : " liberal education
— that is, an education in which the individual is
cultivated, not as an instrument towards some ulterior
end, but as an end unto himself alone ; in other words,
an education, in which his absolute perfection as a man,
and not merely his relative dexterity as a professional
man, is the scope immediately in view." '^

Here we have the antithesis between the liberal and
the useful assumed, and it is seen to be closely connected

1 See Re/>. 485-487. 2 la^'s, 788.

^ De Ingeniih Moribus : trans, by Woodward in Vittorino da Fellre^
p. 102.

^Discussions, p. 264.

WHAT SHOULD BE THE END? 6i

with that between an individualistic outlook on life and
one which gives full place to the relations of the
individual to his fellows. Of such a limitation all
statements of the aim of education in terms of the
individual alone are suspect : at least they all permit it
to be read into them. They are, therefore, inadequate
because they fail to set forth a real aim for a training
for actual life. There lies at their base the idea that it
is possible to be a man without being any particular
kind of man — that is, without having any definite
position or function in the general life of the community.
This, indeed, is a view on which Rousseau specially
prided himself. "In the natural order, men being all
equal, their common calling is the state of manhood,
and whoever is well educated for that cannot fill badly
any which is connected with it. Whether my pupil be
destined for the army, the Church, or the bar, concerns
me little. . . . To live is the trade I would teach him." ^
This is specious but fallacious. Once it is remembered
that every human being has definite relations to his
fellows and his own functions to fulfil in the world, it
is seen that a man who is simply man in general, and no
man in particular, is a mere abstraction. The " common ;
calling" of humanity can only be followed — even in
childhood — in a particular form ; that is, in particular
relations and with particular functions and duties. To
make his scheme even plausible Rousseau has to postu-
late that no habits shall be formed in boyhood. This
is an evident impossibility, but it is necessary to the
argument, for Rousseau's training is to fit his pupil to
live the ' life according to nature ' — a scarcely human
existence related merely to the physical environment.
^ Emile, liv. i.

62 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

In truth, Rousseau does not train man in general, but a
being fitted only to live in the woods and the fields
apart from human society. That such a training would
prepare for any specific form of social life is as palpable
a fiction as is the avoidance of all habituation.

" Man might live at first
The animal life : but is there nothing more ?
In due time, let him critically learn
How he lives ; and, the more he gets to know
Of his own life's adaptabilities,
The more joy-giving will his life become." ^

As Pestalozzi, commenting on this doctrine of Rous-
seau, says, "When I ask, Why am I a citizen, or
a handicraftsman, or a peasant, instead of being just a
man.^ then I find that in all these relationships there
are advantages that I cannot dispense with. ... So
soon ... as I desire to make more of myself than Nature

has made of my race, I must rise to the control of her

There are ideals to be striven for, on the attainment of

which man's happiness rests He may find them

when he ceases to be actuated by primitive natural
motives." "

But if man cannot live out of relations to his fellows,
which are as essential parts of his life as are his
individual personal qualities — without which, indeed,
many of his powers and feelings would not really exist ;
that is, without which he would be but a fragment of
a man and not the general pattern of man, the offspring
of Rousseau's fantasy — then his education can only omit
reference to those relations on condition of being itself

1 Browning : Clean.

- The Enquiry, trans, by Green in Pestalozz't's Educational IfritingSy
P- 59-

WHAT SHOULD BE THE END r 61,

imperfect and incomplete. Nay more, in fitting a human
being for life, education cannot be neutral. Throughout
the time of youth habit is being formed, and if refer-
ence to the actual part which must be played in life be
omitted, the habit of disregarding such functions and
duties is surely growing and is unfitting the boy or girl
for their future discharge. Though it does not, we
think, express the whole truth, there is force in Herbart's
contention that " the aim of education is sub-divided
according to the aims of choice — not of the teacher, nor
of the boy, but of the future man, and the aims of
morality.'''' ^ In the duties of his station each of us finds
the concrete form of his moral life.

Thus it is that every abstract statement of the aim
of education must constantly receive a fresh interpreta-
tion. Perfection of life would not be the same in form
to Plato as to ourselves, for he and we live in very
different spiritual atmospheres and in very different
social and economic worlds. "A human being is
nothing if he is not the son of his time ; and he must
realize himself as that, or he will not do it at all." ^ So
the ethical end of life and of education, while in ultimate
essence the same, is ever demanding restatement, and,
evidently, as the economic functions of men are always
changing the form in which they fulfil those functions
must also change.

This would be a sufficient reason, even were there ,
no other, for rejecting the extreme psychological view
that a child's education should be wholly determined by
his spontaneous impulses. For that is to regard him ;
simply as an individual. And " the mere individual is ]
a delusion of theory ; and the attempt to realize it in

^ 0/>. cii. p. 109. " F. H. Bradley : op. cit. p. 172.

64 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

practice is the starvation and mutilation of human
nature, with total sterility or the production of
monstrosities." ^ Demands from without are as in-
tegral a part of complete human nature as are promptings
from within.

Here comes in the danger of the opposite error to
that which we have been considering — the error of that
exaggerated and narrow ' utilitarianism ' which has dis-
gusted all who believe in the value of other elements
in life besides the material, so that in natural — if mis-
taken— reaction they have scouted all consideration of
the usefulness of training in the practical affairs of life
as foreign to education. The root of the whole evil is
found in the absence of any general consideration of the
meaning and purpose of life, and of education as a
preparation for life — in a word, of educational theory.
What is desired by the disciple of the prophets of
Mammon is a trained ability to make money, to produce
or aid in producing some material utility, to become
an effective actor in the busy industrial and commercial
life of the time. Now, all this is good in itself. For
better or for worse our country lives mainly by manu-
factures and by commerce, and the very existence of the
vast majority of its inhabitants depends on their
industrial and commercial efficiency. An education
which neglected this could not be a complete training
for future life in our day and country.

It is, however, only too easy to exaggerate the import-
ance of the material side of life, and the whole course
of the development of civilization during the last
century or so has tended to cause an undue emphasis
to be laid on this, to the detriment of the culture of the

' F. H. Bradley : op. cit. p. 158.

WHAT SHOULD BE THE END? 65

higher spiritual powers. The advance in wealth and
material well-being has been much more marked than
growth in nobility of thought and act. The mistake of
estimating men by their possessions, and not by their
worth, is almost universal, absurd though it must appear
to any clear thinker. " The delusion that money is an
universal power, meeting all human needs, is a super-
stition amounting almost to idolatry." ^ This excessive
respect for worldly goods obscures the real interdepend-
ence of men, for it gives birth to all forms and degrees
of individual competition for the good things of this
world. It exaggerates individualism, which by itself is
anti-social, though, in due proportion with the sense of
human brotherhood, it is an essential factor in a strong
and self-respecting character.

This, then, is the danger of an excessive and narrow
utilitarianism in education — that it tends to fix attention
too exclusively upon those activities of life of which the
spring is the acquirement of personal wealth, and so
starves that higher spiritual side of our nature which
is the true bond of union between ourselves and our
fellows, and which is shown not in a barter of service
but in a willing beneficence which seeks no return.

The aim of a liberal education is this very broadening
and strengthening of our human sympathies and of our
understanding of men and of society, the cultivation of
power to find joy and delight in all that is noble, and
beautiful, and true ; the aim of a utilitarian training is
to fit us to fulfil our economic functions in the form of
social organization in which we live. Stated thus, the
antithesis cannot be denied. The one is addressed to
the spiritual side of our nature, the other to its material

^ St. George Lane Fox Pitt : The Purpose oj Education, p. 46.

66 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

side. If the one fits for work, the other prepares for an
ennobling use of leisure.

But every person has some leisure, and if anyone
escapes work it is only because he fails to recognize his
social duties. This leads us to the denial that, whatever
such an one's education might be called, whatever studies
it might include, in whatever school or university it might
be obtained, it is a liberal education. His higher self
remains as undeveloped as if he had from his earliest
years passed his time in a factory, and given his energies
to tending a piece of machinery. It leads further to the
rejection of Whewell's limitation of a liberal education
to that given to the wealthy and leisured classes. It is
possible to receive all the intellectual culture that
Whewell sets forth and yet not be liberally educated ;
on the other hand, it is possible to be liberally educated,
in that all the higher spiritual qualities are developeds
without a long and expensive course of such instruction.
The test of whether an education is liberal or not is
to be found in its effect on the soul of the educated ;
it cannot be decided by a simple scrutiny of the external
\ means adopted to train that soul. To do this would be
to make again the false assumption of the separateness
of the elements yielded by our analysis of experience.
No subject of study is in itself either liberal or illiberal ;
it becomes one or other only in its relation to the
individual. If the pursuit of any subject strengthens
the higher spiritual elements in any person, that subject
is a factor in his liberal education ; if it fails to do so it
is not liberal, whether it be utilitarian or not. Many a
boy who has spent the years of his youth in a compulsory
study of Latin and Greek has never entered into the
living spirit of classical writings, has never felt his heart

WHAT SHOULD BE THE END .= 6-

warm with wider human sympathies, or his spirit glow
with the revelation of a higher ideal of beaut)' than he
had hitherto imagined. To such an one classical litera-
ture has not been a means of liberal education. But
to the few who do thus enter into communion with some
of the greatest of hum.an spirits that literature is truly
liberalizing.

Ever^'thing depends on the spirit evoked in the
learner, that is to say, on the kind of incentives to effort
he finds in the subject. There is, doubtless, force in
the contention that records of the thoughts, aspirations,
ideals, and efforts, of mankind are richer in direct
spiritual incentives to the m.ajoriri' of minds than are
those that deal with the m.aterial world around us.
Certainly, the possibility' — or even probability- — of such
incentives being found in them seems clear to us, and,
as a 2:eneral statement, the claim that such subjects are
specially ' humanizing- ' is probably true. But there are
many particular cases in which it is either not true at all,
or only with serious limitations. Not only may litera-
ture and history, and kindred 'humanistic' subjects,
be studied without appreciable liberalizing effect, but
the studv of science may develop iust those qualities
which mark the liberally educated man.

The spirit evoked in the learner largely depends on
the ostensible obiect with which the learning is pursued.
To studv classical or modern literature or law or
medicine or philosophy with the simple purpose of
earning- a living- bv it is as definitely utilitarian as to
study woodwork with the simple object of becoming
a successful carpenter. It is not a matter of social class
or of occupation, but of the extent to which the spiritual
aim or the material aim dominates the life. If either

68 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

be ignored the education is narrow and imperfect, no
matter what its apparent richness in content. For
human life is both spiritual and material, and any educa-
tion that fits for it wholly must be at once liberal and
utilitarian.

Here the need is found for more careful examination
of what is really utilitarian. Doubtless, all that prepares
for earning a living comes under the name, and so far
we have not gone beyond that meaning. But suppose
we ask * Why should a man earn a living ? ' we can get
but the obvious answer * In order that he may live.'
* But what is the object of living ? ' Push this question
home, and the material utilitarian can in consistency only
reply ' To earn a living,' for the acquisition of wealth
is in itself nothing but earning a living on a more
luxurious scale. So material utilitarianism reduces our
lives to the purposeless treadmill round of earning a
; living in order to go on earning a living. If, however,
the life be " more than meat, and the body than raiment "
then a better and a wiser answer can be given — one which
does not reduce human endeavour to the hollow mockery
which is all that materialism has to offer. We should
earn a living in order that we may live more fully and
truly in our spiritual environment — that our hearts may
become purer, our lives nobler. So only can we enter
into living peace.

If this be so, we must ask whether what makes for
that higher life for which the material life is but a
foundation is not useful in as true a sense as what makes
for efficiency in the material life itself. There can be
but one answer. Indeed, it follows that the utility of
the former is as much higher than that of the latter as
the spiritual is above the material. Nothing bears

WHAT SHOULD BE THE END? 69

stronger witness to the prevailing materialism of life
and thought to-day than the current restriction of
'utility' to what concerns the maintenance and ameliora- I
tion of the physical life. Let this delusion be destroyed, I
and the ' practical ' man may cease to despise the things
of the spirit, and the philosopher to hold himself aloof
from mundane affairs. The thinkers of ancient Greece
erred by despising the material life of industry ; the
' practical ' tendency of our own age is in the direction
of the opposite error of exaggerating its vital import-
ance. And the latter error is more fatal than the former.
The progress of material civilization fifty years ago
seemed to satisfy the aspirations of most men ; now the
whole social fabric is threatened, just because the spirit of
mutual beneficence — the strong feeling of the interdepen-
dence of all the members of a community — has been
neglected. In a word, an exaggerated utilitarianism in
life and in education — the education of home, of friends
and acquaintances, of street and workshop, if not of
school (and that was often utilitarian in spirit even when
it taught little that was practically useful) — has so sapped
the higher human life that the crying need of our day
is the spiritualizing or liberalizing of the education of
all classes.

Such a liberalizing cannot be accomplished unless
width of interest and of outlook be secured. Any
system which absorbs the interest in the self and its
concerns is opposed in spirit to a liberal education. This ^
is the root of the evil of the premature specialization of
studies which marks the intellectual training given
to-day. Modern life becomes ever more complex, and
modern men as individuals take an ever more restricted
part in its material activities. This is itself narrowing.

70 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

But, at the same time, modern life provides ever-
increasing means of satisfying interests apart from work.
Public libraries, museums, art galleries, and parks,
frequent concerts and lectures, theatres, societies with
religious, social, and intellectual, objects — these and
kindred avenues are open to the dwellers in our large
towns where contact with nature is not facile. All are
opportunities for the maintenance of the higher spiritual
life. None of us probably will feel strongly that all of
them are incentives, but all should hear and respond to
the call of some. It is notorious, however, that but a
small minority of any class is so affected. The majority
seems to be immersed in business, and to seek relaxation
only in some of the many trivialities which lie on the
surface of life but do not enter into its core. Thus, a
real utility calls for an education which should prepare
the individual to respond to such calls as these to feed
his spiritual life, and so not to drift into a mere economic
materialist spending all his strength and energy in
securing that which perishes in the use. Premature
specialization cannot do this. It is not that many masses
of facts, or statements of facts on various topics, need
be acquired. Too often erudition is the grave of
thought. It is that dynamic forces should be brought
into frequent and strong operation which should impel
the individual to seek to understand, and to sympathize
with, many of the forms of existence in the world of
which he forms a part.

All education, then, whether its formal operation be
extended through school and university till the years of
manhood, or whether schooling ceases with boyhood,
will, if it be true education, be at once liberal and
utilitarian ; for it will make for efficiency in the

I

WHAT SHOULD BE THE END? 71

material life and for fullness and joy in the spiritual
life.

No one can say how much of our present unrest and
distress is due to the failure to recognize this in practice,
and that failure is itself the outcome of the tendency to
allow all such matters as education to drift along on the
stream of tradition and prejudice, the issue obscured by a
careless and ambiguous use of terms. The meditation
which results in theory of life and of education was never
more needed than it is to-day. That is to say that
nothing can have a greater practical or utility value than
such careful and judicious theorizing. For sound
theorizing is not the spinning of webs of fancy, but the
deeper understanding of facts. The chief fact to be
understood is surely this compatibility of the liberal and
the useful. Each makes for perfection and completeness
of the individual life, and for its effective membership
of the organized community. " I call a compleat and
generous Education," wrote Milton, " that which fits a
man to perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously,
all the offices both private and publick of Peace and
War." ^ So that the compatibility we are urging was
asserted by one of the greatest of Englishmen, It is
sad that neglect of theory of education has obscured it
for more than two and a half centuries.

Is a culture at once liberal and practically useful
mainly a matter of knowledge or of mental capacity and
attitude .? This brings us to the antithesis in the theory ,
of intellectual culture between erudition and formal
mental training. It is fashionable in the scholastic world
at present to deny the value of mere knowledge of facts
— and to demand it in examinations. Little experience,
^ Tractate on Education.

.i

72 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

however, is needed to convince us that if acquirement
of facts is a preparation for life it is a very poor one,
for many — if not most — of the facts each one of us learnt
from our teachers at school have long since disappeared
beyond our power of recall. Such acquisitions were of
the nature of artificially formed habits of verbal expres-
sion, which speedily decayed with disuse. Nor are they
generally either missed or regretted ; they never touched
the imagination or stirred desire. The only facts which
are constituents in that real intellectual life, which is not
so much erudition as a wise and sane conviction and
point of view, are those which relate us to our environ-
ment in such a way that some purpose is furthered, or
some light thrown on that which was felt to be obscure,
so that a greater power, unity, and comprehensiveness,
are felt to arise within us. This means essentially that
such facts are actively sought, not reluctantly, or even
passively, received. The seeking involves investigation
and assimilation to the growing dynamic forces which
relate each individual to his surroundings. So the facts
do not remain in the 'storehouse of memory' laid up
like the treasure hidden in a napkin, ready to be repro-
duced as little changed as possible, and as far as may be,
without diminution. In so far as schools foster this
latter mode of relating their pupils to the world in which
they have to live, they are not only uneducative, but
actively anti-educative, institutions. For, here again
habituation plays its part, and a wrong attitude towards
learning is cultivated, the natural result of which is a
distaste for all that is conventionally included under that
term.

There is no true intellectual training unless the mental
powers are exercised. The idea that these are separate

1

WHAT SHOULD BE THE END ? 73

organs of mental life, which can be so trained that they
are universally applicable, was the fashionable educa-
tional doctrine of the nineteenth century, and still retains
the adhesion of many, both schoolmasters and laymen.
It was the assumption on which the devotion of school
life to the study of Latin and Greek was urged, and
which Spencer and Huxley showed could be used with
equal effect in advocacy of science. This theory implies
that the relations of man to his environment are acci-
dental, and not of the very texture of his life. According
to it, man's powers not only have their root in his nature,
but, in whatever field they may be trained, they can shake
themselves free from their associations, and fiinction
readily in other spheres. Experience does not bear out
the theory ; and, as the complexity of life and of know-
ledge increases, its inadequacy is more and more openly
revealed. A man's judgement is sound only in matters |
in which he can understand the force and the relevance |
of the facts on which he is required to exercise it — that 1
is, when he has pertinent knowledge. Life cannot be
reduced to syllogisms, the premises of which stand in
isolation from all but themselves. To cause a child to
learn subjects chosen because their study demands the
exercise of certain forms of mental power, and therefore
trains certain faculties, is not enough. He may as a
result be well prepared to deal with problems cognate ■
to those in which his powers have been trained, but for
dealing with questions remote in nature he has received
no direct preparation. He can only transfer to the study
of the matter they embrace any habits of application,
of care in weighing evidence, and of caution in drawing
conclusions, which his training may have made character-
istic of all he undertakes.

74 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

This is not really questioned when it is pushed home
to matters of knowledge. The classical scholar does not
claim that by his linguistic and literary training his
judgement has been made of value on a question of
scientific or mechanical knowledge. If he can form an
opinion on such topics it is because he has acquired
cognate knowledge. Similarly, the botanist may have a
highly-trained habit and a remarkably developed power
of observation in matters botanical : he can see on a slide
in a microscope many things which to a layman may be
invisible. But he may pass over unnoticed many indica-
tions of character in those around him, or many details
in a picture, a cathedral, or an orchestral symphony.
Indeed, this is often not only recognized but exagger-
ated. One result of the specialization of modern life
is that there is a tendency to assume that a man's judge-
ment cannot be of worth outside the main line of his
interests. So a clergyman is held to be a bad man of
business, and a solicitor to know little about agriculture.
Plato's abstract principle of ' one man, one pursuit '
is arbitrarily, or perhaps unconsciously, assumed as an
actual rule of experience. No doubt, in many cases such
suspicions are justified by facts, but to generalize them
into a rule is as illegitimate as is the opposite principle
that specific training gives general power. Special train-
ing directly develops some general power in a specific
form, but the activities of life are not isolated in water-
tight compartments, and it is certain that a trained intel-
lect can more readily master a new subject than can an
untrained one. But the subject must be mastered by
fresh work before judgement on any part of it is of
worth.

Each of these theories — that of acquiring knowledge

WHAT SHOULD BE THE END? 75

and that of mental training — is thus seen to be comple-
mentary to the other, and only when the separation of
spiritual activity into its form or faculty, and its content
or matter learnt, is taken as absolute, instead of as merely
the abstract result of an analysis we ourselves make
of the concrete facts of experience, do they appear as
opposed to each other. Such a separation has no cor-
relate in that experience itself. In real life all learning
is a training of intellectual power, and all training of such
power is given through the medium of matter which, by
the process itself, is learnt. To take a mental abstraction
as a basis and guide of concrete effort is to condemn that
effort to partial sterility. The question as to what a
given individual should learn must be answered by a
consideration of what is needed to enlighten and vivify
both his present life and his probable future experience.
No general answer is, therefore, either possible or desir-
able, though broadly typical answers can be found in so
far as the forms and requirements of various positions in
a modern state can be grouped. The attempt to make
the instruction wholly relative to one form of an assumed ■
future, without reference either to present needs or to the
wider and more general functions of the future, is the
error of the extreme vocational doctrine. It sacrifices
both the present child and the future man in the hope of
making a possible mechanic or surgeon or linguist or
mathematician.

If the answer has really taken account of all the present
and probable needs of life, it will contain material the
real assimilation of which will call for the exercise of
the powers of the mind, and will thus give the mental
exercise upon which the other doctrine so rightly insists.
Doubtless, an unskilful teacher may do much to hinder

76 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

( his pupils from rightly learning anything, especially if
i he act upon the hypothesis that he should do as much as
j possible for them, so that the path to learning may be
'' broad and pleasant and well strewed with flowers. Alas !
that this broad and pleasant road — as he proudly deems
it — should not only lead to intellectual distraction but
should so sap the energy of him who is led along it that
he becomes mentally decrepit, and goes out into the
world with powers of self-direction and guidance unde-
veloped and dormant. But the error lies with the
teacher, not with the conception of what should be
taught.

As knowledge is power to act and to meet the calls of
■ life as they are made, so there is no separation between
what needs to be learnt and the exercise of the powers
required to learn it. Each must be as wide and varied
as is experience. The assumed antithesis between know-
ledge and faculty only appears when knowledge is
separated from the mind which knows, and faculty from
that on which it is exercised and apart from which it
cannot even exist. Immediately this separation is recog-
nized for what it is — a mere matter of convenience for
abstract discussion — it is seen that each piece of learning
calls for that exercise of mental power which will be
needed in its future use. Faculty and knowledge are,
in actual life, not two things, but one complex dynamic
power, as insolubly united as are the speed and the bullet,
or the blow and the hammer. Of course, as power is
developed it is there to be turned in another direction,
so that new learning becomes more facile, because the
mind is habituated to concentrated effort and methodical
work. That is the truth in the theory of mental
gymnastic. But till the power is applied in the fresh

WHAT SHOULD BE THE END? 77

direction, so that knowledge is acquired, it remains a
mere potentiality and not an actual force in life. That
is the truth in the doctrine of the value of knowledge.
Only when the two are combined is it true, as matter of
factj that knowledge is power.

This line of thought leads us also to the resolution f
of another antithesis — whether education can do alii
or nothing. There is in education as in life the inter-]
action of personal spiritual activity and environment,
and it is both easy and common so to exaggerate the
strength of either as practically to reduce the other to
nullity. On the one hand we are told that education
cannot change nature, but only remove hindrances to its
development : on the other that original nature is pas-
sive, and is moulded entirely by external influences, so
that to the extent to which an educator can control the
environment he can determine the nature of the indi-
vidual he is training.

This antithesis derives its strength from the assump-
tion of that same essential separateness between man and
his environment which we have already considered and
rejected. The solution — that each is interrelated with
the other in that one complex reality which we call life, so
that neither can be negated without the annihilation of
that life — shows that both these views of the power of
education are exaggerated. That the influence of en-
vironment is found in every detail of life is a necessary
corollary, so that it is by no means surprising that certain
wild children, who had in infancy been abstracted from
human habitations by wolves and had been suff^ered to
live among their captors, should have shown no traces of
civilized human life. They had not learnt to talk
because their environment at the time when the instinct

78 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

to speak was functioning included no model from which
they could learn. But they had learnt to do other things
which children brought up in normal human surround-
ings do not learn to do. In other words, their lives
were — like the lives of all of us — a constant interaction
of personal force and personal environment.

So far, then, as education can determine what occasions
for nutriment and exercise a child's soul shall have, to
that extent it can determine the matter amid which that
soul shall find the objects of its thoughts and feelings and
desires. But it cannot determine more than this. The
relative dynamic force of the impulses towards this or
that feature of the environment the educator can and
should notice. He may then so rouse opposed forces
within the soul that those directions of energy which he
judges undesirable may be checked. This he does by
emphasizing some other element in the spiritual environ-
ment, in the hope that it may find respondent to it a
nascent force. In brief, the dynamic forces of life are
born within us, but what they become — the direction
they take, and their relative strength — depends on the
amount and kind of cognate material with which the
environment presents them. Thus it is evident that the
spiritual environment of purposes and ideals is of greater
educative importance than is the material environment
which determines bodily comfort or discomfort. The
latter makes for or against spiritual uplifting indirectly,
through the thoughts and desires to which it may give
occasion to function ; the former calls them forth directly.

Education — or the conscious control of environment
— is, then, limited by the influence of those constituents
of the environment which it cannot control. It is further
limited by the extent of the bodily and spiritual powers

WHAT SHOULD BE THE END? 79

of the individuals to be educated, and by the readiness
with which they respond to educative influences or
surroundings. This latter depends largely upon the
personality of the individual educators, who are the most
active and prominent elements in those surroundings.
Some educators can infuse with their own spirit practi-
cally the whole of a child's spiritual environment ; others
are no more than isolated points in that environment, and
once out of sight are out of mind.

So it is seen that the duality which is fatal to clear
thinking on life and experience in general is equally
disastrous to any theory of education which is based on
the hypothesis of the independence of the child to be
educated and his educative surroundings — that is, the
educators and their conscious determination of the scope
which shall be given to his spiritual and bodily activities.
The education of the child is the dynamic stream of life
which is at once the child and the surroundings that
influence him.

If one of these factors be removed the process of
education ceases ; if one of them be partially withdrawn
it is distorted. It is obvious that if a child die his educa-
tion comes to an end, and that it is thrown out of shape
if he become mentally afflicted, or, to a less extent, if he
be physically disabled. This is equally true if the other ■
factor be prematurely removed or weakened. Thus, the
widespread notion that only at school does education go
on has for the great majority of children the disastrous
consequences that during childhood it is intermittent,
and as soon as school days are over it ceases. But the
educative environment is very incomplete if the school
is the whole of it. Schooling must end for the majority
of children long before the age at which education by

8o WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

others has been transmuted into self-governance and self-
direction. Outside the school there is a pressing need
for the active recognition of their responsibility by the
other constituents of a complete educational environ-
ment, especially by families, and by religious and social
communities.

Employers, too, have their educative duties. Each
and all who are in a relation of authority towards the
young ought to recognize that this responsibility extends
beyond the activities which they direct and which are
the immediate bond between them and those whom they
employ, and touches the whole life of those partially
under their charge. The weakening of the personal
relation of almost parental responsibility which formerly
existed between an employer of the labour of the young
and those whom he taught and paid was an inevitable
outcome of the extension of modern industry, but its
absolute negation, and the substitution for it of a mere
money tie, is a misfortune to the community.

Much more inexcusable, and much more disastrous,
is the abnegation of their educational duties by many
parents. The prevalent loose thought as to the rights
of children is doubtless partly responsible, as it fits in
with a kind of vague and sentimental humanitarianism at
present fashionable. But it may be suspected that mere
inertia of will is yet more the reason. There must also
be added that absorption in the superficial trivialities of
life which, unhappily, so often marks the modern mother.
Many causes combine to lead to a common neglect of
parental responsibility, and little hope of improvement
in our social life can be felt till they are removed, and
parents again recognize generally that undiscriminating
tenderness and indulgence, mixed with neglect, are not

WHAT SHOULD BE THE END? 8i

competent to train a human life. The sad symptoms of
superficial and narrowly egoistic lives, of class antago-
nisms, of absence of the recognition of the essential
interdependence of all the constituents of a community,
show how far real education is wanting among us. On
the other hand, happily, the increasing number of men
and women whose lives are inspired by an intense convic-
tion of the need of social solidarity, who not only feel
deeply the ills from which the body politic suffers and the
dangers with which it is threatened, but think seriously
and earnestly how those ills may be remedied and
those dangers averted, is evidence that it has not been
altogether lacking. All such social reformers recognize
that good education is the chief lever by which to raise
their fellows.

This is surely true, but it is a far cry from such a |
position to the popular fallacy that lengthened schooling
and increased instruction are a certain cure for social ills.
Unless the increased scholastic efforts are inspired with
the spirit, and directed by the principles, of a true educa-
tion they are little likely to contribute to real improve-
ment ; and unless they are supported by concurrent
efforts in the homes of the scholars they must be largely
wasted. Improvement in education depends on the
elevation of the general spiritual life of the community,
and this depends on improved education. Nor is this a
vicious logical circle. Such mutual interaction and
determination of forces is the characteristic feature of
human life, and is itself a proof that that life is through-
out a relation between man and his environment. The
important thing to remember is that they are forces, and
that if their mutual action does not make for exaltation
of life it must make for its degradation. We may try to

82 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

increase the one force, but unless the other be increased
as well the total effective result cannot be great. The
spiritual uplifting: of the people needs to be sought
directly, as well as indirectly through education.

We may now sum up the argument. A true educa-
tion is concerned with the whole being : not with body
alone, nor with soul alone ; still less with some one
aspect of the spiritual life, such as intellect. It is equally
concerned with the whole width of life : not with utili-
tarian occupations alone, nor with intellectual or aesthetic
pursuits or even with morality of conduct alone. It
recoQ^nizes that man is both an individual responsible for
his life and a constituent in a community in relation to
which he has both rights and obligations, and that the
latter of these is as essential a part of his nature as the
former. It takes account of the real nature of life or
experience — whether it be seen chiefly in practical
activity, in thought, or in feeling and emotion — that
always it is a complex unitary process, and that the dis-
tinction we make in it between subject and object —
thinker and matter thought — is artificial. One term
of the relation is meaningless apart from the other,
and life is a constant synthesis of the two. It accepts,
too, the truth that this complex process is not mechanical,
but vital and spiritual. What in the potential spiritual
and material environment is taken up into experience is
determined by the ever-expanding and often-changing
active trends of spiritual energy of the individual, and
by the kinship between them and this or that part of that
potential environment. It understands by environment
everything which in any way touches the life, and so it
remembers that the actively exerted influences of other
human beings are the most important elements in that

WHAT SHOULD BE THE END? 83

environment. Yet it avoids the error of imagining that
strong exertion of influence is sure to succeed. It bears
in mind that, no matter how much effort may be put
into the attempt to influence, there is only actual influence |
to the extent to which an active response is evoked, so
that the impetus is taken up into the life, it may be
positively as a directive force, or it may be negatively as
a repellent one. There is no education outside the will
of the person educated ; but on the other hand there is
no educative influence outside the will of the educator.
In true education each educator will recognize that
he is not the only educative force, and that unless all
those forces act in harmony they tend to neutralize
each other. He will remember that some educative
forces are wrongly directed, and he will be very careful
to consider whether any of his own efforts fall into that
class. Wrong direction more often implies absence of j
the right ideal than wrong intention.

A true and complete conception of the educative pro-
cess, which combines its antitheses in a synthesis deter-
mined by an understanding of the nature of human life
and so avoids exaggeration on one side or the other, is,
however, only an abstraction until it is determined
towards what concrete end the process is directed. Now,
a process which takes up the whole of human life can
only make for an end the nature of which is given by that
life. For, " what we desire must be in our minds ; we
must think of it ; and, besides, we must be related to it
in a particular way. If it is to be the end, we must feel
ourselves one with it, and in it ; and how can we do that,
if it does not belong to us, and has not been made part
of us ? " But, as man is by nature a part of the social
whole into which he is born, " where is the difficulty of

ar

84 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

my object being one and the same with the object of
other people ; so that, having filled the form of my per-
sonality with a life not merely mine, I have at heart, and
have identified with and made one with myself, objective
interests, things that are to be, and in and with the exist-
ence of which I am not to satisfy my mere private self ;
so that, as I neither will nor can separate myself from
what makes me myself, in realizing them I realize
myself, and can do so only by realizing them ? " ^ If
the end be too narrowly conceived the process must be
both imperfect and deformed, for one aspect of life will
be over-emphasized. On the other hand, unless the true
nature of the process be fully and clearly grasped, the end
conceived can hardly do justice to the full and perfect
stature of humanity. This is really to say that a perfect
conception of education will only be possible when a
perfect comprehension of life is attained. To that, man-
kind can as yet lay no claim. All that the most earnest
thinker and reformer can do is to analyse as carefully and
exactly as he can the facts with which experience presents
him, and from them deduce the needs and aspirations of
human nature, and conceive an ideal in which they would
find satisfaction and fruition. The task of the thinker
on education is to seek the common elements in such
ideals, and to try to reconcile apparently discrepant views
by recognizing the truth in each and seeking the limita-
tions of that truth, in the hope of so reaching a fuller
conception, which will show the divergences not as irre-
concilably opposed but as partial and complementary
apprehensions of the whole truth.

From our analysis it appears that the end of education
is the development of full and effective human person-
^ F. H. Bradley, op. clt. pp. 75 to 77.

WHAT SHOULD BE THE END? 85

ality — that is, a life in full and admirable relations to the
universe. This seems less liable to misinterpretation
than the statement that education is the formation — or
even the development — of character. For ' character '
carries with it preponderatingly individualistic associa-
tions, which can be avoided in using the term ' person-
ality.' It is true that one's personality is one's very self,
but it is one's whole self, in its weakness as well as in its
strength, in its moods as well as in its principles, in its
disposition as well as in its will, in its relations to the
whole of its surroundings and not only to those in which
the moral quality is prominent, as it appears to others and
not only as we may see it ourselves. It is part of a man's
personality to be jovial or grave, witty or dull, quick or
slow ; to be interested in this or that branch of know-
ledge, to be attracted by all the newest suggestions,
whether in art, in science, in politics, or in religion, or to
be most fondly attached to all that is old and sanctioned
by tradition ; but these, and many such, are not parts of
what is commonly understood by character.

Thus interpreted, character is a part of personality but
not the whole of it. We can dislike a man's personality
and yet on the whole admire his character ; in other cases,
much as we dislike and even despise the character we are
conscious of an attraction — of which we are, perhaps,
half ashamed — towards the personality.

It is, however, not sufficient to relate character and
personality as part and whole, for that gives no guidance
for the distribution of educative efforts. Remem-
bering that, as we are using the words, all character is
personality, but not all personality is character, we may
say broadly, that character is that part of personality
which refers to one's attitude towards the moral aspect

86 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

of life — towards duties requiring strength and persist-
ence of will — rather than to intellectual interests or
charm of manner. So character may be called the core
of personality, because it contains that nucleus of pur-
pose which determines the general trend of life, and
around which all smaller purposes and ideals are more or
less effectively and intelligently grouped. If the char-
acter does not grow in strength and dignity the person-
ality can but show all kinds of inconsistent qualities, and
the life be marked by vacillation and ineffectiveness.
Character sets up the central ideals of life ; other transi-
tory and partial ideals may not all be properly included in
character, though they may determine smaller and less
important parts of life. To desire to become a good
dancer, a good conversationist, or a brilliant wit, may
lead to conduct which gives a distinct mark to the person-
ality, but we should not speak of any of such desires and
purposes as in themselves part of character. Of course,
if their relation to the obligations of life and the calls of
duty is one of antagonism, then the yielding to their
solicitations shows weakness of character, and their adop-
tion or rejection is the work of character.

It is not possible to mark off character from the rest of
personality by any rigid line, nor is it desirable to attempt
it. That would be in contradiction to the doctrine of the
essential unity of the normal life on which we are
throughout insisting. And, in practice, the absolute
exclusion of any one set of activities from the purview
of character would lead to a disastrous moral laxity.
Yet it is important to remember that what common con-
vention includes under character is not the whole of life,
and that, therefore, education should not be narrowed to
moral considerations. They are its first care, because

WHAT SHOULD BE THE END? 87

character is the very marrow of personality ; but they
are not its whole care, because personality — that is, life —
is wider than character.

Character is essentially the inner spirit which deter-
mines the motives of acts ; so that no one can directly
know the character, or with certainty infer the motives,
of another. Others can see only our acts, and from them
they speculate as to our motives and imagine our char-
acters. So they form a judgement as to our moral worth.
But their view of us is not confined to this. It embraces
also our disposition, our manners, our powers — in short,
our whole personality. Thus it may happen that a
man's reputation may be of a very mixed kind. At
once he may be judged a charming companion and a man
of loose principles ; a ' good fellow ' and a moral weak-
ling. Some may lay the emphasis on the external
attractions, others on the more solid internal qualities.
But always the core of reputation is common estimation
of character.

Here is danger of a dualism against which education
should be on its guard. Reputation and character may
approximately agree, and the more closely the outward
act conforms to the inner spirit — that is, the more per-
fectly the life is organized — the nearer should be the
approximation. But there is always some divergence,
and that this may be serious is brought home to us at
times in a startling way when some event lays bare a
character altogether contrary to the reputation hitherto
enjoyed. Now, the desire to be well esteemed by
those around is a strong incentive to almost everybody,
and it is often a valuable inhibitory force when a
temptation to act unworthily is felt. The danger is that
instead of strengthening the power of resistance it may

88 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

bend the energies to the avoidance of discovery. The
effort may be to preserve the reputation, but not the
character, unsullied.

Here we have another instance of the illegitimate
separation of the external from the internal in our lives,
and one which, if persisted in, means a continuous
degradation of character. The ideal set up is, to have
something, not, to be something ; thus it is of the same
order as that of the gross materialist who regards the
accumulation of wealth as the highest function of man
and the sole end worthy of serious endeavour. The end
is thus put outside the spiritual life itself, and placed in
the environment in a hidden negative relation to the real
life. It is hardly to be doubted that, for want of a clear
grasp of this distinction, both families and schools often
do much to cultivate a kind of double personality, in
which the real purpose of life is kept secret in the heart,
and the ostensible purpose shown in observed conduct
is not really felt. Such a life is on its way towards moral
shipwreck. It is developing weakness instead of gather-
ing strength as it advances, for its energies are divided
against themselves.

There is another aspect of the relation of character and
reputation. As reputation is the general estimate of a
person's worth by the people among whom he lives it is
determined by the standards of value current in that
particular social group. It is not an absolute reflexion
of worth, but a reflexion in a mirror more or less
distorted by common weaknesses and misapprehen-
sions. It follows that to attempt to justify reputation
is never the highest aim open to the individual.
So far, then, as character is moulded by such attempts
it reaches a standard lower than it should and could

1

WHAT SHOULD BE THE END? 89

attain. The goal which education should set before
its disciples is not the pattern set by the usually very
moderate expectations of others, but the ideal which
each soul can see revealed if it will look beyond actual
human weaknesses and imperfections, and compromises
of the true and the false, the good and the evil, in the
service of a supposed expediency. Unless reputation be
left to take care of itself while the highest is strenuously
pursued, the life will not advance as far as it could
towards perfection.

The educator, then, must recognize the important
practical influence of the human environment, and must
often find in it excuse or palliation, and cause for pity
rather than condemnation, of much of which he dis-
approves in the conduct of those under his care. He
will endeavour, so far as he can influence it, to raise the
standard of expectation as to conduct and motive which
the smaller society he controls holds before its members,
but he should also endeavour to lead each individual
gradually but surely to look for guidance beyond and
above the common expectation and the common maxims
of acceptable conduct, and to find in the approval of his
own conscience a surer sanction than in the acquiescence
of his fellows.

Personality, then, is the whole man in all his activities, I
in all his relations, in all his aspirations. It is noble in I
proportion as its foundation is a noble character — stead-
fast and high in aim, wide and tolerant in outlook, bene-
ficent in intention, deriving its inspiration from a loving
faith in a personal and all-embracing wisdom and good-
ness and love.

Looked at thus it is plain that the growth of person-
ality is the gradual organization of life in a hierarchical

90 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

system of living purposes. Starting with the instincts
and other innate tendencies, through experience of living
in certain surroundings and under certain influences
dynamic forces gather strength in life. On the one
hand, these forces need to be harmonized and reduced to
order ; on the other, none is to be absolutely negated.
The aim is the whole and complete life, and in that every-
thing that is natural to man has its appropriate place and
function. The task of education is, then, one of direc-
tion of these inner forces, not of attempted annihilation
on the one hand, nor of leaving them to their own inter-
necine struggle on the other. In early life those forces
which make for the preservation, development, and
gratification, of the bodily life are the strongest, and
unless the appearance of innate higher spiritual forces
be watched for, and they be eagerly and sedulously
nursed into strength, they will stand but little chance
in their inevitable conflict with the lower impulses.
Yet, could the latter be altogether eliminated human life
would be but a fragment, and the spiritual itself would
tend to become arid and unfruitful. It is subordination,
not annihilation, that is to be sought, and subordination
is gained indirectly by strengthening the higher, which
then acts directly in taking for its own the energy and
opportunity which would otherwise have found vent in
the lower.

So the whole of educative eflbrt can be summed up in
the term ' incentive.'

" I count life just a stuff
To try the soul's strength on, educe the man."^

To make manifest that a union of two or more modes of
eflbrt — or trends of energy — will more fully secure what

^ Browning, In a Balcony.

WHAT SHOULD BE THE END? 91

is held desirable is to begin the task of co-ordinating and
organizing the spiritual life. The process is the same
in spirit throughout, though continually wider in scope.
Its ultimate aim is the perfect organization of life under
one great purpose which finds its meaning in one great
ideal. To these, in many ranks of extent and import-
ance, other ideals and purposes are related, so that the
entire life becomes a community of forces covering the
whole of human nature and aiming at the perfection and
completion of that nature. Throughout, we are dealing
not with empty abstract forces but with active, pulsing,
concrete, human life. Such a dominating ideal would,
therefore, be a true and complete picture of the highest
good possible to man, and that, as we have urged, is
found only in a relation to that highest good and true
personality which we call God. That is the ideal towards
which a perfect education would strive ; and educational
progress can consist only in drawing continually nearer to
it. But the possibility of such approximation depends
before all else on reaching as true a conception as is
possible of the meaning and purpose of human life.
Unless in practice education be dominated by such a
conception it can be but a concourse of well-intentioned
efforts, which have no determinate effect because they
have no determinate goal.

Though we have attempted to reconcile divergent
views on the aims of education yet we must not shut
our eyes to the fact that this reconciliation does not cover
the most ultimate question of all — the question whether
the spiritual or the material is to determine the main
purpose of life. " It is often urged that the two sides
of our nature can be made to work hand in hand.
Possibly, but the important question is : which shall be

92 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

dominant ? Unless we constantly keep our minds clear
on this point, the risk is very great." ^ So, too is the
danger great that the current antitheses, instead of being
held together in a higher synthetic view, may be
alternately taken as absolute. For ourselves we have
no hesitation. To us " the life is more than meat and
the body than raiment." It follows that if the material
naturalistic view now so often accepted implicitly as the
practical guide of life, though less often explicitly
preached by professed philosophers than it was fifty
years ago, be true, then our doctrine is fundamentally
false, though some of the details of the practice we
recommend may be true in this as in other settings. If
there be no originative spiritual energy in man, so that
his life is wholly formed by external agencies, then our
theory falls to the ground. If, on the other hand, man
be uninfluenced by his surroundings and undetermined
by his own past life, again our words are vain. If man's
life be not at once a self-determining spiritual activity
and a constituent in the social life — or rather social lives
— in which it is passed, then again we have no true
message to deliver. For we assume as our fundamental
principle that man is spiritually free, and yet determined
by the spiritual life he has lived and is living, and by
the spiritual environment in which he has lived it ; that
the ultimate aim of life is, therefore, spiritual and not
material ; that spiritual growth is advance in spiritual
capacity both to receive and to impart spiritual strength ;
that this implies that man's spiritual life is derived from,
dependent on, and sustained by, spiritual agencies which
are super-natural in the sense that they are above and
beyond the material. In brief and plain terms, that

^ St. George Lane Fox Pitt, op. cit. p. 51.

WHAT SHOULD BE THE END? 93

man's life is not only material but moral and social, and,
yet more, religious. Consequently, the theory of educa-
tion we are attempting to set forth is one which assumes
that the activities of life should be evaluated according
to a spiritual standard which finds the highest good of
man in the perfection of his spiritual nature — in nobility
of heart and mind, in reverence and awe in the con-
templation of the divine perfection, in love of all that
is great and good, in hearty acceptance of duty, in
strenuous endeavour, in earnest longing for truth, in
appreciation of beauty, in an estimate of the things of
life consistent with the view that what a man is far out-
weighs what he has, whether of material or of intellectual
possessions. It seeks to work out the principles of
educative activity which follow from these fundamental
conceptions, principles, the verification of which must
be sought in experience of the actual training of the
young.

CHAPTER III
SYNTHESIS OF LIBERTY AND AUTHORITY

The aim of life, as we have urged, is the organization
of experience in a hierarchy of purposes making for all
that is good and true and beautiful. Thus, the true life
is ever progressive : in it character is never petrified by
habituation, but uses the automatism of habit as its
instrument. This is to say that man's end is spiritual
freedom; for to be free is to be able to realize the potenti-
alities of the self. Only in proportion as the individual
is free, therefore, can he be said to attain the perfection
of his nature. Free activity is thus seen to be the very
essence of human life.

Yet we know that we are bound and limited on all
sides. Desires often fail of fruition. Not what we
would, but what we can, determines our actual endeav-
ours :

"The common problem, yours, mine, every one's
Is — not to fancy what were fair in life
Provided it could be, — but, finding first
What may be, then find how to make it fair
Up to our means : a very different thing ! "^

For man exists as a constituent both in the material
universe and in a social organization, and his power to
act is limited by the necessity that his action should be

1 Browning : Bishop Bloiigram^s Apology.

LIBERTY AND AUTHORITY 95

in harmony with physical and social forces. The inter-
action between the inner spiritual force and the environ-
ment which we have found to be of the very texture of
life negates any such idea as that of individual freedom
acting in a kind of material and spiritual vacuum, and
influenced by nothing but the impulses that arise spon-
taneously— that is, unprompted — within itself.

Yet it is such spontaneous impulses which on the
surface appear to be most free, and this identification of
'spontaneity' and liberty lies at the bottom of the
suspicion of authority which is so prominent a feature
of all aspects of human intercourse to-day. Doubtless
there is added as a contributory cause a general self-
sufficiency and pride, which the material progress of the
last century has tended to engender. Nor must the
influence of the eighteenth century doctrines of the
equality and natural rights of men be forgotten. So
that the fashionable impatience of authority in the train-
ing of the young is only a manifestation of a much more
general spirit which repudiates obedience as a moral
obligation in all the relations of life.

Even when we pass beyond the elementary stage of
thought and experience which accepts this identification,
and find that freedom is connected less with unmotived
impulse than with deliberately adopted purpose, the task
of reconciling our innate thirst for freedom with the
circumstances of our lives remains. For all around us
are other beings with the same right to the free pursuit
of their own private ends, and the same need of so
realizing their natures. This would give need for
reconciliation, even were all human beings equal and
independent units. In such a state of anarchic indi-
vidualism each would strive to carry out his will, and

96 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

the strongest would prevail. So equality would dis-
appear, and those unfitted to survive the struggle would
be annihilated. There would be ' natural selection ' and
the 'survival of" the fittest' — to survive. This is the
idea upon which Tolstoy would base an education which
each child should receive when and how he likes, and
which recognizes in the educator no power of constraint
over him.

In organized community life, however, this anarchical
arrangement has never prevailed. The essence of such
life is the existence of government in graduated stages.
The philosophical justification of this subordination of
man by man is that the community is the individual
on a larger scale — larger in aims and collective wisdom
as well as in power :

" A people is but the attempt of many
To rise to the completer life of one."^

The moral basis of subordination is the fact of relative
superiority and inferiority. No doubt, in the very
imperfect forms of social organization which mankind
has yet attained, this relation is often violated in the
actual arrangement of ranks, but where it is obvious —
as in the small and natural society of the family — it is
a violation of nature, and not an adherence to it, which
would treat the child as the moral or intellectual equal
of the parents. As rational would it be to assume that
he is their equal in bodily strength.

But it is urged that freedom can only grow out of
freedom. In the sphere of education, this involves a
fallacy of ambiguity. The freedom into which we desire
to grow is connected with purpose ; that from which this

^ Browning : Lutia.

LIBERTY AND AUTHORITY 97

is said to spring is related, not to purpose but to impulse
which, as we all know from our own experience, is too
often the most dangerous enemy of purpose. To this
latter all restraint — all authority — is certainly anti-
thetical : to the former we hope to show it is comple-
mentary.

On the first view, and to the superficial thought which
take things at their face-value, then, authority is opposed
to liberty, for it always appears as constraining the
individual to do what he would not otherwise do, or as
restraining him from doing what he wishes to do.
Even if it be granted that some regulation of conduct
by others is necessary in social life and in education, yet,
so long as no principle of synthesis is reached, the
problem of the extent to which the exercise of authority
is justified remains unsolved. It is determined by
expediency, and is ever liable to be met with opposition.
Such uncertainty in education can only be disastrous,
and its resolution is one of the most urgent needs that
theory is called on to supply.

" Where am I to draw the dividing line between
freedom and obedience ? " asked Pestalozzi in the diary ^
in which he recorded his education of his little son ; and
in these words he stated this perennial practical problem
of all human life, and, therefore, of all education.
Always and everywhere we are confronted by the eternal
antithesis between liberty and authority, and the progress
of mankind has been a long-continued effort to determine
the legitimate sphere of each. We think of the struggle,
perhaps, most easily in politics, and we trace the attempts
of nations and peoples to attain political liberty ; or we
look at the history of thought, and congratulate our-
^ Trans, by Green, Life and Work of Pestalozzi, p. 39.

G

98 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

selves that we live in an age and country in which each
one may think what he wills, and, within very wide
limits, may try to persuade others to agree with him.
Liberty is a modern divinity, to which many odes have
been addressed ; authority is out of fashion, is put on
one side as antiquated and discredited, or, at the least,
is required to justify its existence as a necessary evil.

Yet, as Horace warned us, " Though you expel nature
with a fork, yet will she ever return." And it is instruc-
tive to the student of mankind to note how the old
goddess Authority when expelled from any of the affairs
of men soon comes back, masquerading in the garb of
her supplanter. Liberty. For, indeed, both liberty and
authority are original requirements of the human soul
and of human life. The true task ever is to reconcile
them, or rather, to resolve their forces into one supreme
force ; never to eliminate the one and give life over to
the exclusive domain of the other. The problem of life
j is insoluble in terms either of freedom alone or of
f authority alone ; the more nearly the true relation of
these two forces is found the more nearly do we approach
the solution of that great problem, which, whether we
recognize it or not, faces us all.

This necessity of combining liberty and authority is
commonly acknowledged in politics. Neither in tyranny
nor in anarchy does the student of history or the man
of sound common sense, taught by experience and
observation of life, look to find the ideal political
organization. Nay, in neither does he expect to find in
its purity even the one principle on which it is ostensibly
based. The Reign of Terror was the eighteenth century
expression of the negation of political authority, just as
the dominance of minorities by majorities is that of our

LIBERTY AND AUTHORITY 99

own day. If tyranny is tempered by anarchy, it is
equally true that anarchy is tempered by tyranny.

Perhaps the same truth is less readily recognized in
the domain of thought. That " thought is free as air "
is one of those pleasant similes which we readily accept
because they seem to be so flattering to our self-love.
But of the air it is said : " The wind bloweth where it
listeth." Is it so of thought.'' When once one has
grasped the demonstration of Pythagoras, is one free to
think that the square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled
triangle is not equal to the sum of the squares on the
sides ? Are there any stronger chains than those which
logic imposes on the rational mind? We are free to
think — so long as we think accurately. We are, also,
as we know, alas ! able to think wrongly, and we not
infrequently make use of that power. But we never do
it freely, that is, willingly and of set purpose. We
always think in the way which at the time the given data
seem to us to demand. In other words, our thoughts
are constrained by the authority of facts as well as by
that of logic, that is, of their own life. When they are
not thus constrained, we call them the play of fancy or
the delusions of insanity.

But further. Much as we pride ourselves on our
modern superiority to our mediaeval forefathers in this
very point of freedom of thought, a little wholesome
self-examination reveals to us how easy it is to deceive
ourselves in the matter. We are credulous in one way,
our forefathers were credulous in another ; and neither
we nor they would be prepared to confess the credulity.
Their oracles were theological, ours are scientific : that
is the chief difference. In each case the majority of
people have to " take the master's word for truth," just

loo WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

because it is the master's word. Our forefathers, trust-
ing to the evidence of their senses and the authority of
their teachers, believed that sun and moon and stars made
a daily circuit round a fixed earth. We moderns surely
do not yield less to authority in thought when, at the
command of our scientists, we disregard the evidence of
our senses that the earth is not moving and the heavenly
bodies are, and believe the very opposite. Yet, not one
in a million of those who accept this truth as axiomatic
has reached it by his own free thought and investigation.
At the most he has, at the bidding of authority, con-
sidered the evidence that has been gathered and
marshalled by the master minds. The great mass of
people believe it merely because from childhood they
have been assured by all who have mentioned the matter
to them that it is so.

We have glanced at these things simply to bring out
clearly the truth that freedom and authority are insepar-
able, even in cases in which at first sight they seem to be
incompatible with each other. We see that it is only
while we take the most superficial of views that we can
look on them as opposed forces ; that a little analysis
suggests to us that their true relation is quite other than
opposition. Nor does it really matter from which of the
two extreme terms we begin the analysis. A searching
examination into liberty brings us to authority, and a
searching examination into authority brings us to liberty.
In each case we have then reached not an abstract meta-
physical concept, but real, concrete, striving, human life.

So long as we fix our thoughts on one extreme only
we are obviously unable to reconcile it with the other ;
for each by itself is a mere figment of the imagination
— as unreal as is colour apart from form, or form apart ■

LIBERTY AND AUTHORITY loi

from matter. For, indeed, to think of liberty as
absolute and not as correlative with authority, or of
authority as absolute and not as correlative with liberty,
is to think each as merely negative. Authority then
becomes the denial of liberty : it disposes of everything,
and the subject is a mere machine ; or liberty becomes
the denial of all authority — the assertion that neither
from within nor from without is there any determination.

As has been already pointed out, this, in its purest
form, is really unthinkable. But, few minds do push
their thoughts to their ultimate consequences. Most
stop half way, and excuse their inconsistency by calling
the abstraction they cannot realize, an ideal. This is to
excuse superficiality of thought by confusion of thought.
An ideal is always realizable, and always being realized.
The ideal of last year is the starting-point of this year.
The ideal recedes, because each attainment makes pos-
sible the view of a yet farther attainment. But, in all
its expanding forms, the ideal is realizable, because it is
itself real in its nature : it is concrete, for it embraces
the whole of that existence which it idealizes or puts on
a higher plane. But, an abstract idea, such as unlimited
authority or unrestricted liberty, is not realizable even
in thought, because it is not real in its nature. It is not
life, but an aspect of life ; and it can no more be realized
alone than can the facade of a house exist without the
house itself.

Nor is this of merely theoretical interest. For the
work of education it is of fundamental practical import-
ance. Education means nothing unless it means the
progressive attainment of an ideal of life. To substitute
for a true ideal an abstract figment of the imagination
vitiates the whole process. So it may even be said that

I02 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

nobody who has not thought out the true place of both
liberty and authority can be a good and successful
educator.

To the plain man education seems obviously a process
largely determined by authority, and that we know was
the accepted view of mankind for many centuries. The
exercise of authority was, indeed, plain to see ; and was
often expressed in ways unacceptable to us, because
unsuited to the spirit of the age in which we live. It
does not follow that they were equally unsuited to the
age in which they were used : at any rate they evoked
no revolt and called forth no general protest. But, be
that as it may, it is certain that this authoritative educa-
tion did not destroy initiative in those to whom it was
applied. There was, in the Middle Ages, no lack of
original and daring speculation, of astute statesmanship,
of dashing military leadership, of commercial and indus-
trial enterprise, of political sagacity, or of effective doing
of the deeds of common life. The true evil came later.
When the inevitable reaction against the excesses of the
pagan humanists of the Renaissance led to a stricter rule
over conduct, and when the traditional studies of the
schools ceased to evoke desire in the pupils because they
were so remote from the real intersts of life, and because
the method of teaching had become mainly the dogmatic
imposition of verbal statements — largely incompre-
hensible and wholly unattractive — then authority in
school both over conduct and over thought became
tyranny. And it was tyranny, not because it was strict,
or even severe and harsh, but because it opposed itself
as a mere dead external obstacle to the will — that is, to
the freedom — of the young. It was authority in as
negative a form as it is possible to have it.

i

LIBERTY AND AUTHORITY 103

Now, the imposition of such an authority does nothing
to form the lives of those on whom it is imposed. At
the most, it regulates action, and may succeed in forming
those habits of behaviour and bearing of which the
etiquette of the French Court in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries was so shining an example. So its
most common product may be expected to be the manne-
quin reacting more or less gracefully to each trivial
situation in polite society. Beneath all this another life
goes on, and that is apt to be a life of unrestrained
impulse and sensuous gratification. But there are
stronger souls who rebel from the first against the
artificial thwarting of their lives ; who yield at the time
but an intermittent and compelled obedience, and who
go their own way openly and unrestrainedly whenever
the shackles are removed. Of these, too, the eighteenth
century offers us striking examples in the course of the
French Revolution.

So, in both cases we see that the negative authority of
education did not destroy the innate freedom of the
human soul ; but it did tend to give it the debased form
of negative freedom, that is, the freedom which is limited
by no obligations to observe constraints.

It was, however, the artificial conventionality which
it had so generally succeeded in imposing on its victims
that was the most obvious fruit of eighteenth century
education. That education could, indeed, claim with
some superficial plausibility that the private excesses
were not its outcome, because it had not sought them.
Still, it was these conventionalities which provoked
reaction ; and, as we all know, the reaction was voiced
by Rousseau. Now, as the need for both freedom and
authority is inherent in our nature, so that in our lives

I04 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

we can dispense with neither, it is almost inevitable that
reaction against overweighting the balance on the one
side should overweight it on the other. This was the
error of Rousseau. His conception of liberty was just
as imperfect and superficial as was the conception of
authority against which it was a protest. To him
freedom was merely absence of human interference, and
this is the underlying conception of the system of
negative education of which he was the prophet. In a
passage of first rate importance he writes : " Keep the
child in dependence on things only ; you will follow the
course of nature in the course of his education. Never
oppose to his indiscrete desires any but physical obstacles
or the punishments which are born from the actions
themselves and which he will remember at need ; with-
out forbidding him to do ill, it is enough to hinder him.
That he can, or that he cannot, should alone stand to
him for law." ^

It is true that Rousseau does not fall into the error
of supposing that this would train the child's moral
nature : that was reserved for Herbert Spencer. To
Rousseau the child thus to be left to the physical world
for his training is essentially a physical being. He feels
and he perceives, but he does not yet get beyond per-
ceptual thought, and so has no real intellectual interests
and no power of grasping moral ideas or of acting from
moral principles. It is important to remember this,,
and to bear in mind that in Rousseau's view, moreover,,
these higher aspects of our lives are always accidental and
unessential. For him, the essence of life is at once per-
ceptual and negative. This he insists on again and again.
For example, he says : " He is the most happy who
^ Entile, liv. ii.

LIBERTY AND AUTHORITY 105

suffers the fewest pains, and he the most miserable who
enjoys the fewest pleasures. Always more of sufferings
than of joys ; that is the common lot of men. The
happiness of man here on earth is, then, only a negative
state ; we ought to estimate it as the suffering of the
fewest ills." ^ Quite consistently, Rousseau fails to
recognize that true life is full of purpose, and ever has
its eye fixed on some worthy goal only to be reached
after much struggle and strenuous endeavour. For him
all such looking forwards is foolishness, if not actual
wickedness. " Forethought," he insists, " is the true
source of all our miseries," ^ and he exhorts us :
" Restrict, O man, your existence within yourself, and
you will never be miserable. Remain in the place which
nature assigns you in the scale of beings ; nothing can
enable you to quit it. Kick not against the hard law
of necessity, and exhaust not in attempts at resistance
the powers which heaven has given you, not that you
may widen or lengthen your existence, but only that you
may preserve it in such way and to such time as to heaven
itself seems good." ^ In consonance with all this,
Rousseau forbids an educator to restrain children for
their future benefit, on the ground that by so doing he
deprives them certainly of some present pleasure while
he cannot be sure that his treatment will have the effect
he desires, even if the child lives to grow up, which is
itself uncertain.

Now, this attitude of Rousseau towards life is funda-
mental in his teaching about education as distinct from
instruction. About the latter he repeated many wise
things which earlier writers had said, and he added some
of his own. But the whole of his doctrine of education
^Ibid. "-Ibid. ^Ibid.

io6 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

— as set forth in the training of Emile — stands or falls
with his view of life. And that view is that the highest
aim open to man is to get through existence with the
least possible amount of personal discomfort. If that
be true, the theory of non-interference is justified. For
then " each man liveth to himself alone " as far as he
can, and his training should fit him to lead such a life.
Doubtless, as has been already argued, this abstraction
is incapable of realization. So, indeed, Rousseau finds
it. He exhorts the tutor of Emile to " leave him to
himself in freedom ; note his actions without saying
anything to him about them ; see what he will do, and
how he will do it." ^ But why note them ^ If freedom
be simply absence of all determination of conduct from
without, what justification is there for even the existence
of Emile's tutor.'* What, indeed, is the excuse for
writing the Emile or any other book on education .f*
W^hen Rousseau includes under " an education purely
negative" the safeguarding of heart and mind from
error, he departs from his fundamental principle. Even
in his imaginative sketch he is reduced to a compromise,
because his conception of liberty does not admit of
reconciliation with that of authority. And, as we all
know, the absence of interference is only pretended :
the tutor determines what Emile shall seem to do so
freely ; but he hides his constant control behind an
elaborate apparatus of trickery.

Nevertheless, in such a system there is an appearance
of freedom, so that of Emile his creator asks : " Does
he not feel that he is always his own master.'' " ^ And
this Is where the importance of the whole doctrine comes
in. What is the effect on a child of feeling that he is

I

LIBERTY AND AUTHORITY 107

always his own master, a feeling impossible to experience
without an absolute disregard of the feelings and wishes
of others? That he would be self-centred was with
Rousseau a desirable result : nothing else accords with
his estimate of life and the end of life. But will the
training have developed in him a love of freedom, and
that strength of character without which nobody can
carry out his will, even though no man oppose him?
We will seek the answer first from Rousseau himself,
and afterwards from one of his enthusiastic disciples.
Though we are all familiar with Rousseau's picture of
the immediate result which he holds up for our admira-
tion in his description of Emile at the age of twelve,
still it will be well to have it fresh in our minds. Here
it is ; or rather the parts of it which are pertinent to
our present point : " Speak to him of duty, of obedience,
he makes nothing of what you say ; command him in
anything, he will take no notice ; but say to him, ' If
you will oblige me in this, I will return the favour some
other time,' he will immediately hasten to do as you ask,
for he likes nothing better than to extend his domination,
and to acquire rights over you which he knows you will
esteem as sacred. . . . Work and play are all one to him ;
his play is his work ; he sees no difference. . . . He
knows nothing of what is merely routine, custom, habit ;
what he did yesterday has not the slightest influence on
what he does to-day ; he never acts on rule, never yields
either to authority or to example ; he does and says only
what pleases himself." ^ That is the young boy ; and
though it is only a fancy picture, yet it is one which is
the logical and, indeed, the inevitable outcome of the
course of training which refuses to recognize the weak-

1 Ibid.

io8 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

ness and incompetence of childhood, which teaches the
child that his own gratification is his only care, which
ignores the whole of the natural bonds which bind him
to his family, and through his family to the rest of
mankind. Whether he be physically removed from the
family, like Emile, matters little or nothing. Rousseau's
system is anti-social, not because Emile lives alone with
a tutor, but because all his cares are centred in himself,
his whole concern is to secure what seems to him to be
his own good. Of this ideal of boyhood at fifteen we
are told : " He considers himself without regard to
others, and finds it well that others do not think of him.
He demands nothing from anybody, and believes that
he owes nothing to anybody. He is alone in human
society ; he relies entirely upon himself." " In a word,
Emile has all the self-regarding virtues." Surely it is
ungrounded optimism to fancy that " to have the social
virtues also he has only to learn the relations which
demand them ; he simply needs the enlightenment that
his spirit is prepared to receive." ^

That being the boy, what about the man ? Probably
many are not familiar with the later result of his system
which Rousseau began to set forth in the Emile et Sophie.
The book is unfinished, but enough has been written for
our purpose. Rousseau's aim was freedom, as absolute
as possible. This was the highest good for man, though
not, as we learn from his description of the training of
Sophie, for woman. Who, then, is prepared to find
Emile in full manhood, complacently shown as quite
satisfied to be in slavery in Algeria.'* But thus the hero
soliloquizes : " There is no real servitude but that to
nature, of which men are only the instruments.

^ Ibid. liv. iii.

LIBERTY AND AUTHORITY 109

Whether a master fells me or a rock crushes me is in
my eyes a similar fate, and the worst that can happen
to me in slavery is to be as unable to soften a tyrant as
a stone. Moreover, if I had my liberty, what should
I do with it ? In my present state what more can I wish ?
Well then ! Not to fall into nothingness I must be
animated by the will of another in default of my own." ^
So he draws the conclusion that the difference between
slavery and liberty is "more apparent than real."
This outcome of education in freedom for the sake of
freedom is sufficiently remarkable, surely, to raise doubts
as to the wisdom of the whole scheme, and as to the
competence of its author either to guide us in our
work of dealing with the young or to teach us to
understand that liberty which is the crown of human
life.

This, then, is the kind of man the system is designed
by its inventor to produce. His essence is that he
cannot guide his own life, after all. Like Reuben, he is
" unstable as water," and, like Reuben, such a man
" shall not excel." Few have been rash enough to
bring up a child deliberately on Rousseau's principles,
though many, both in the past and in the present, have
been deeply influenced by him. But Richard Lovell
Edgeworth was one of that few. He tried to bring up
his eldest son on the principle of non-interference, but
though he had nineteen children, happily for the others
he did not repeat the experiment. Of the boy thus left
to bring himself up he tells us : " My son was then
almost nine years old ; he had considerable abilities,
uncommon strength and hardiness of body, great
vivacity, and was not a little disposed to think and act

^ Lettre ii.

no WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

for himself. . . . But I found myself entangled in diffi-
culties with regard to [his] mind and temper. He was
generous, brave, good-natured . . . but he was scarcely to
be controlled. It was difficult to urge him to any thing
that did not suit his fancy, and more difficult to restrain
him from what he wished to follow. In short, he was
self-willed, from a spirit of independence, which had
been inculcated by his early education," ^ The later
history of this youth showed that he was wanting in
application and steadiness of purpose to the end of his
days. In this real case, as in the imagined case of Emile,
the absence of authority in education led to very im-
perfect freedom.

Freedom, regarded negatively, is merely absence of
interference and opposition. But the interference is
always with something positive, and that something
is action. To be free means to be free to do. There is
no meaning in a freedom to do nothing and to accom-
plish nothing. Thus freedom is seen to be not an
absolute, but a relative, good. It is good to be free,
not just because it is good to be free, but because, unless
we are free we cannot do what we would. But to do
what we would is to carry out our purposes. Thus,
freedom is good relatively to purpose. Everything,
then, which hinders the carrying out of our purposes
lessens our freedom ; everything which facilitates the
accomplishment of our purposes increases our freedom.
Positive freedom is the power of effective doing. It
follows that everything which trains children to form
high purposes and to seek strenuously to accomplish
them, trains them in progressive freedom ; everything
which lessens their power of pursuing a purpose decreases
^ Memoirs, chap. x.

LIBERTY AND AUTHORITY 1 1 1

their freedom, even though at first sight it may seem to
be an expression of it. For we grow in freedom as we
grow in stature, in strength, in skill, and in intelligence.
There is the fundamental error of Rousseau and all his
disciples. They seek man's nature in his innate impulses
and tendencies, instead of in the spiritual perfection he
is capable of approaching ; and they set up that nature
as the pattern of life. It was quite consistent with this
for Rousseau to maintain that civilization has degraded
humanity. So they assert that man is born free, and they
condemn all that would interfere with that original
freedom.

This is at the root of that vague and unthinking
acceptance of the fundamental principle of Rousseau —
that interference and authority are in their nature evil
as enemies to the child's freedom, and are, therefore, to
be avoided as far as possible — which has taken such a
strong hold of parents and teachers in these latter years.
So we have the fashionable doctrine that everything is
to be made agreeable to the child, that his impulses and
caprices are to be the educator's sole guide, that he is
never to be called upon to do anything distastefiil. Like
Emile, he is to see no difference between work and play,
and so, of course, is never to labour for an end even
though the present task be disagreeable or even painful.
But, in truth, man is born free only in the same sense
in which we may say that he is born intelligent, or
physically strong and dexterous. He has innate im-
pulses to activity which, if properly trained, may become
power of strenuous and persistent pursuit of purposes
intelligently formed and morally approved. But, with-
out training, this growth into true freedom will no more
take place than will the corresponding development of

112 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

mere capacity for thought into a real power of dealing
with intellectual problems.

That man grows into freedom, when freedom is thus
understood positively as power of effective action, is
true both of each individual and of the race. The march
of civilization, far from having been the progressive
enslavement of man, has been his progressive enfranchise-
ment. All man's inventions and discoveries, by adding
to his power to do what he wills, increase his freedom
of action. The sea which formerly hindered him from
passing from place to place is now his ally ; the elec-
tricity, which in past ages he knew only as an erratic
destructive force, is now the instrument of his will ; the
rock which defied his puny efforts now falls in fragments
because he explodes a charge of dynamite or gunpowder
which he has inserted in it. In conquering nature man
increases his freedom, as he removes from his path
obstacles formerly insuperable. But he conquers nature
only on the condition of first understanding, and then
obeying, her. Man's inventions are nothing but con-
trivances to utilize the forces of nature which he has
learnt to know. To the laws of those forces he must
yield absolute obedience, or again he finds them hind-
rances instead of helpers. So, as far as regards man's
dealings with the physical world, it is plain that increase
of freedom in action means increased recognition of the
constraint of physical forces. The inventor can no more
alter the action of the forces he ' controls ' — as we say —
than can the unlettered savage. He can turn those
forces to his own ends because he can submit himself
to their restraint not blindly but intelligently, not because
he can disregard them at his own will. In a word, he
has attained greater harmony between the spiritual

LIBERTY AND AUTHORITY 1 1 3

forces within him and the environment in which they
function.

In his dealings with his fellows, man's growth in
positive freedom is not, perhaps, so plainly marked, but
it is none the less evident when we compare the organiza-
tion of a mighty modern state with that of a primitive
society. That growth is essentially one in co-operative
action, in which individual wills are merged in a common
will in all that concerns the common end. Remove that
co-operation and there ensues a state of civil disunion
of which the only outcome is civil ineffectiveness. Or
look at the individual rather than at the community.
Modern man does, and is able to do, far less for himself
by his own unaided efforts, even to maintain his life,
than his distant forefathers. Yet it is clear that he lives
on a far higher plane. Not only is his physical life more
secure and more comfortable, but he can do much more ;
he can accomplish purposes which the savage cannot
even conceive. The more we reflect on the matter the
more we see that an individual by himself can do very
little, can realize but few of his ideas, can carry out but
few of his plans. In other words, by himself he has
but little freedom. Just as, to fulfil physical purposes
we must use physical means, so to fulfil our human plans
we must have human auxiliaries who help directly and
indirectly — mainly, of course, the latter.

How false, then, is the view that freedom is essenti-
ally an individual independence of others ! " The only
man who accomplishes his own will," says Rousseau,
" is he who, in order to do so, is not obliged to use
another man's arm in addition to his own." ^ In other
words, as freedom is negatively conceived as simply
^ Emile, liv. ii.

114 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

absence of interference, so to him it appears real only
when human help is abjured as well as human hindrance
avoided. But, expressed in terms of positive freedom,
this is to say that man is free in direct proportion to his
powerlessness and ineffectiveness. The whole of experi-
ence and the whole of history disprove the truth of this.
It is by united effort that men do great things, and every-
one who conceives a grand idea is led by instinct to seek
the association of others in realizing it. Does he feel
that in forming his society of helpers he is increasing or
diminishing his freedom.'* Was Mr. Booth more free
to carry out his charitable designs before or after he had
organized the Salvation Army? There is no need to
labour the point ; it is too obvious. Everywhere and
always men seek, and ever have sought, " to use other
men's arms in addition to their own," and that for the
very object of increasing their power of freely carrying
out their own purposes.

But that which can help can also hinder. Just as
physical forces hinder us when we try to act in opposition
to their laws, so is it with human forces. All associa-
tion of men to attain a certain purpose implies the
common acceptance of such rules of action as tend to
the accomplishment of that purpose. Further, it
generally implies that the application of such rules is
in the hands of one or more leaders, whom the other
members of the society obey. In such obedience do
they lose, or do they increase, their freedom ? Put thus
generally the question is really meaningless, for it
assumes mere abstract freedom in concrete circumstances.
Freedom to do what? — that is the real question. Evi-
dently the only freedom which should be in question
is the freedom to accomplish the end for which the

LIBERTY AND AUTHORITY 1 1 5

association exists, and equally evidently, that is increased
by the obedience required. So, for example, a member
of a religious community vowed to obedience, even
though he has resigned the individual and personal
control of some of his actions, yet has done so as a means
of increasing his freedom to attain what he regards as
the main purpose of his life. He no more decreases his
total freedom by his action than a merchant who spends
money on his business in the hope of getting a greater
return decreases his wealth.

All this is evident enough when we think of small
societies voluntarily entered in order to attain a desired
and clearly apprehended end. But into the great society
of the community in which we live we enter by birth,
and of its true aims and organization many have but a
confused, if not an actually erroneous, idea. Such idea
grows up gradually from experience of what people
generally approve and disapprove. If we transgress
what are called social laws, or even social conventions,
we find ourselves checked more or less absolutely ; but
in proportion as we act in conformity with them the
forces of society are at our service, both positively and
negatively. Whether the end and purpose of human
life should not be made clear by authoritative teaching
is a question into which this is not the place to enter
fully. Suffice it to point out that unless this is done
many of the actions of that vast majority of mankind
which cannot penetrate into the innermost recesses of
philosophy must remain throughout life mere blind
gropings after the good. But, putting this on one side,
we see that the common experience of each one of us
teaches that so far from the constraint and regulation
of our actions by the approval and disapproval of our

ii6 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

fellows being in opposition to freedom, it is its necessary
condition. For, it is not the meaningless and objectless
licence to change about like a weathercock, but the
unhindered power to carry out our plans and purposes,
that we mean by freedom. It is evident, then, that
socially as well as physically, we gain in freedom to do
what we would in so far as we avoid the hindrance and
secure the help of others ; and this means, in so far as
our conduct is regulated by principles, laws, customs,
and opinions, which prevail in that society independently
of our likings and whims.

To the free carrying out of our purposes there are,
however, hindrances more fatal than those of physical
nature or of human opposition, and those hindrances
we find within ourselves. We are all conscious of
impulses which make it hard to resolve, and harder still
to persevere in executing the purposes in which we are
equally conscious that our highest self is finding expres-
sion. We all know the person who fails in the struggle,
or who even fails to struggle ; who never carries out his
purposes, whose life is ineffective and devoid of intelli-
gible meaning. Is that the free man ? Why, even in
common speech we call him the slave of his passions,
or the victim of his weakness of will. The man who
does things — that is the free man ; for freedom is shown
only in successful doing.

Freedom, then, cannot consist in the unchecked acting
upon impulse. It comes only through the training of
our innate impulses so that they become the servants
of our purposes. If they are not so trained they become
themselves the masters, and all that is noblest and best
in us is under the domination of that * many-headed
monster ' of appetite, passion, and caprice, which both

I

LIBERTY AND AUTHORITY 1 1 7

Plato and St Paul so earnestly exhorted us to bring into
subjection. Let us then enquire by what means man
grows into freedom from the bondage of the lower
impulses, and of the instability of caprice. Evidently
not by giving them the rein and continually yielding to
every fresh fantasy ; for here, as elsewhere, habituation
increases strength. We need the power of habituation
on the other side — the habit of ignoring, as far as we
can, the calls of impulse when they conflict with the
carrying out of our approved purposes. That is to say,
we need to form the habit of inhibition. But, inhibition
is constraint — the constraint of our spiritual nature as a
whole over our animal nature, and over elements in our
spiritual nature itself which are imperfectly organized,
and so may be in temporary alliance with our lower
impulses. In other words, freedom implies, first and
foremost, self-control. But inhibition will not be
exercised unless the feeling of duty — that we ought to
do this and refrain from that — has been trained and
directed within us in our youth. And such direction
and training can be found only in the constraint of
authority.

Nor is this all. Self-control, or power of inhibition,
like all other power, grows gradually by exercise. At
first the child has it not. Nor has he the power of
forming distant purposes and lofty ideals. His animal
life is more advanced than his spiritual life. Look at
him as an individual only, and one cannot see how he
is to acquire the power of inhibition. But, happily, he
is a human individual — that is, a member of a com-
munity, and, in particular, of certain community groups
— family, church, school. Such membership implies
more than artificial addition ; it is natural relation, so

ii8 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

that the community is, in a real sense, a part of the
individual's life. When, then, such a community exer-
cises righteous constraint, it is not a mere interference
with the child's liberty to follow his impulses and
caprices ; it is an influence upon that higher spiritual
self which is at first so weak. But it must be the will,
and not merely the outward action, which is influenced,
or there is nothing but that abstract negative authority
that has already been shown to be inadequate. Though
at times it may be necessary to insist on obedience to a
particular prohibition or command even against the
present expression of the child's will, yet wise
authority succeeds in securing the general adhesion of
that will.

When the prevailing family or school atmosphere is
one of afi^ectionate trust, the constraint is felt primarily
as loving care and friendly suggestion, and, being thus
felt, the child more and more consciously responds to it,
till it is diflficult — if not impossible — to say whether in a
given case the constraint of impulse is more external or
internal. So it will be found that Pestalozzi was right
when he wrote : " Exercise all possible care and thought
in training the child to proper obedience ; duty and
obedience will become a pleasure to him." ^ The
inevitable opposition between duty and pleasure, asserted
by Puritanismand, unhappily, countenanced by Kant, has
existence in fact only for those who have been trained to
find their pleasure in the immediate gratification of each
capricious impulse as it arises. When authority is wisely
and lovingly exercised, its external constraint becomes
more and more merged in the internal constraint of
conscience, till at last the control is predominantly and

^ Diary : see Green, o/>. clt. p. 43.

LIBERTY AND AUTHORITY 1 1 9

essentially internal, though, seldom if ever does any one
of us feel himself entirely unaided by the sense of the
approval or the disapproval of others. Again, then, it is
seen that constraint is not antithetical to freedom but
essential to it.

Freedom, then, like all our other powers, is capable of
development. We are no more born free than we are
born strong or wise. Our first trembling steps towards
freedom must be guided by others, and such guidance is
the constraint of authority, whether it work through fear
or through love. As we accept the guidance — that is,
the constraint — more and more fully, we make the con-
straint more and more that of our own will, though
always our self-control is aided and made easier by the
constraint of society, implicit though it may generally be.
That man is most fully free who can most surely work
out his purposes, unhindered by weakness within or
opposition without ; whose freedom, that is to say, works
within a whole system of constraints, unfelt because not
opposed, that is, thoroughly accepted.

It follows that to regard the young child as free, and so
to look upon all authority and constraint as destructive
of freedom, is to misapprehend altogether both the nature
of human life and the meaning of freedom. Yet that is
the doctrine of Rousseau ; and, though, probably, few
who have a clear apprehension of what it involves accept
it whole-heartedly, it is certain that from it has grown
a suspicion of all exercise of authority, which leads to
vacillation and weakness in discipline both in the home
and in the school. Parents and teachers are uneasy in
constraining children to do or to refrain from doing, and
so they avoid it whenever it seems to them possible to do
so. They exaggerate the importance of giving free play

I20 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

to all a child's impulses and caprices, for fear lest they
should weaken his power of initiative. They forget
that to be always beginning is not the way to be effective.
Such a false doctrine, misconceiving the whole nature of
human life, cannot but have disastrous consequences in
proportion as it is applied in the practice of education.
Whewell truly says : " Young persons may be so em-
ployed and so treated, that their caprice, their self-will,
their individual tastes and propensities, are educed and
developed ; but this is not Education. It is not the
Education of a Man ; for what is educed is not that
which belongs to man as man, and connects man with
man. It is not the Education of a man's Humanity,
but the Indulgence of his Individuality." ^ When we
appreciate the extent to which the poison of the per-
nicious doctrine of the free license of impulse has per-
meated education, we cannot feel that the distinguished
French critic, M. Jules Lemaitre, pronounces too harsh
a sentence on Rousseau, from whom it has been derived,
when he says : " Never, I believe, thanks to human
credulity and stupidity, has a writer done more harm to
man than this writer, who, it seems, did not exactly know
what he was saying." ^

Yet it must ever be borne in mind that the aim of all
external constraint is to develop self-control, and that
this is only possible when the constraint is felt and recog-
nized as good, either through implicit faith in parent or
teacher, or, later, because to this is added some insight
into the reasonableness of the command. This soon
gives us the true limitation of that constraint which is a
handmaid to freedom. It must be loving, clear, and

^ Of a Liberal Education^ p. 7.

'^ Jean Jacques Rousseau, trans, by Jeanne Mairet, p. 280.

I

LIBERTY AND AUTHORITY 121

reasonable in itself, and confined to activities into which
a question of right and wrong enters. In matters of
indifference, constraint is simply tyranny. So we may
take as our rule : In things essential, authority ; in
things unessential, liberty ; in all things, charity.

Further, if the young life is too much regulated by the
directions of another, the power of self-reliance, which
is the very core of freedom, has no chance to become
vigorous. Whenever the true relation of constraint to
freedom is not grasped, the exercise of authority — be it
frequent and strong or infrequent and weak — is bound
to be arbitrary, because it is guided by no principle, but
is determined by the exigences or by the caprice of the
moment. Such exercise of authority is not educative.
Nor is the minute and continuous direction of life,
involving the decision of authority on every kind of act,
educative either ; for it fails to leave growing-space for
self-direction and self-control, and it equally fails to ap-
pear reasonable to the developing boy or girl. The per-
sonality, if originally weak, is crushed ; if initially strong,
it is driven into secret or open opposition and rebellion.
That exercise of authority is truly educative which uses
constraint only against those impulses which are opposed
to the growth of persistence and purity of purpose, and
which so uses it as to make it always an expression of a
loving relation, not an arbitrary act of caprice or temper.
But there should be no shrinking from using it, and
when used it should be absolute. An offered opposition,
withdrawn upon pressure, is the most dangerous aspect
of all weak and ineffective governm.ent. And ineffective
government in education means preparation for moral
shipwreck.

So, we may sum up the task which ever confronts the

122 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

educator, and never more insistently than at present, in
the words of Pestalozzi : " Freedom is good, but obedi-
ence is also good. We must bring together what
Rousseau has put asunder." ^

^ Diary.

CHAPTER IV

WHAT ARE THE MEANS?

Education, as here conceived, is the sum of conscious
efforts to " bring up a child in the way he should go."
It is not a mere drawing out of innate capacities, but
both a directing and a pruning process — a strengthening
of all that makes for the conceived end, and a weakening
of all that is opposed to it. Educate , and not simply
the more primitive educere, is the root of the meaning of
the process as well as of its name. It tries to draw out,
indeed, but to draw out in a way determined by con-
siderations of what is held to be desirable.

Some such determination cannot, indeed, be avoided,
because of the inseparable relation between the individual
and the environment in which he lives. In that environ-
ment he finds his aims, and seeks guidance towards their
accomplishment. Thus, no matter how little direct
training he may receive from his elders, the form of his
life is, to an indefinite extent, determined by them. This
formative influence on the young of the adults among
whom they live is inevitable. Education does not create
it, but should endeavour to regulate it.

It is the inner spirit, and not simply the outer act, that
is to be formed, for the aim of true education is that the
child who is trained may grow into the adult who can
guide his own steps " in the way he should go." Such

124 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

self-guidance implies both will and capacity. What is
good must be perceived and desired, then strenuously
pursued by means which really tend towards its attain-
ment. This involves intelligent action, and so necessi-
tates both pertinent knowledge and adequate power of
constructive and critical thought. Nor would these be
effective without such bodily health and strength and
skill as the activities of life demand.

So the whole life is involved throughout. The
analysis into physical, mental, and moral, activities is
artificial ; and neglect to take account of this in training
the young cannot but wholly or partially vitiate the pro-
cess. Such assumptions as that the bodily life is not
related to mental or moral vigour, or that morality can
be put in a separate compartment from intelligence, in so
far as they guide educative practice, tend to distort the
life which is being moulded. Physical training is not a
mere matter of health and strength and agility of body ;
it is a potent means of forming intellectual and moral
tendencies, and of making the bodily organism a skilful
instrument for the carrying out of our designs. Intel-
lectual training which neglects the body makes for
ineffective adult life even if it avoid premature physical
breakdown ; that which ignores the claims of morality
cultivates the egoist who, regardless of others, seeks what
he esteems his own good, only to find it but Dead Sea
fruit at the last. Moral training which neglects body
and intelligence may produce the anaemic saint or the
narrow-minded fanatic, but hardly the man well fitted to
act nobly and wisely in all his relations to his fellows.

Education, then, must seek means to cultivate all the
aspects of human life in a harmony determined by the
end it seeks. In each of its efforts it should regard not

WHAT ARE THE MEANS? 125

only the apparent immediate end, but the way in which
that end makes for the efficiency of the whole. From
the broad view of perfection every educative effort should
have utility as its aim — that utility which means some
enrichment of human life.

A consideration of means must, however, be related
not only to the end but also to the beginning of the pro-
cess of education. To ignore, in training the young,
the immaturity of childhood is as great an error as to
ignore the need for a clearly conceived end to be sought.
Opposite as these errors are in thought, in practice they
may easily be conjoined. To leave the determination of
his education in a child's own hands is not only to reject
the idea of a determinate end, but to assume that he can
fashion his own life. His immaturity is recognized,
indeed ; but it is assumed that his natural instincts are
sufficient guide for the stage of life in which he is. This
was the teaching of Rousseau, and, though perhaps never
put into practice with logical implacability, it is largely
acted on, and that in the worst of all ways — in alternation
with the exactly opposite doctrine.

Such a theory knows nothing of man's higher spiritual
nature, nothing of his real freedom, nothing of the joy of
self-conquest, nothing of high and noble aspiration ; all
these are beyond the range of instinct, and in advance of
the immediate life of the child. If education do not
point ahead, it must tend to retard the advance of the
developing spiritual life. When it is spoken of as
formative, the essential meaning is that it helps to deter-
mine life by offering ideals and inspiring desires which
lead to effort of a certain kind and directed towards a
certain end. Formation from without by constraint is
ancillary to this : it is the removal of an obstacle to the

126 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

free functioning of the spirit — an obstacle found, it may
be, in the instinctive self, but which a wise use of out-
ward force may remove.

The immaturity and weakness — spiritual and bodily
— of the child is the sole justification of education. But
to justify it is to declare the imperative need for it. We
read much in some writers of " the rights of the child " :
as an immature being its chief right is to be trained into
the stature of the perfect man. As was urged in the
previous chapter, absence of control means the tyranny
of impulse and passion, and no greater cruelty can be
inflicted on a child than to leave him to grow up in slavery
to his low;er nature.

The child has, then, a right to real training and guid-
ance. His elders owe it to him to show him the way he
should go and to guide his steps along it. Whenever
possible the guidance should be in the form of suggestion
and encouragement, but as this implies that some degree
of self-control has already been attained, it is evident
that the younger the child the more immediate must be
the suggestion, and the more frequent will be the call for
definite direction. The whole position is admirably put
by Fichte : " It is scarcely possible that the right of
parents to restrict the freedom of their children should
be questioned. I respect the freedom of another man
because I must regard him as a morally cultivated being,
and must recognise that only as free can he attain the
end his reason approves. I cannot be his judge because
he is on an equality with me. But I do not regard my
child as a morally cultivated being. I see in him a being
to be cultivated, and in this I find my duty to educate
him. So, to restrict the freedom of my child is to fulfil
the same purpose as to respect that of my equal.

WHAT ARE THE MEANS? 127

"It is the duty of parents to restrict their child's
freedom in so far as he might use it in a way harmful to
his education, but no further. All other restriction is
immoral, for it is opposed to the end for which it is
imposed. That end is the cultivation of the child's
freedom ; and this is possible only when the child is free.
Only when his will runs counter to the end of education
should it be negated. Will in general children must
have, for they are to become free agents, and not will-less
machines to be used by others for their own purposes." ^

The earliest means of education, then, is direction,
and that is the exercise, in some form, of authority. The
parent must direct the child while it is too young even to
begin to direct itself. So far its responsive obedience
has no moral quality, because it is simply the effect of
compulsion. From this first stage, therefore, as speedily
as possible a beginning should be made with that training
towards self-guidance the cultivation of which is the
essence of the whole process of education. Here is the
most difficult of its practical problems- — to find in each
individual case where to place the limits of obedience.
No definite and specific rules are possible : the decision
must be left to the wisdom of each individual. The
general principle is that the child should be left free to
act without direction whenever such freedom is not likely
to hinder his progress towards the realization of his
higher spiritual self. When constraint is called for,
suggestion in the form of an expressed wish is the
parent's most effective means, for the response of the
child to that is voluntary obedience ; that is, the parent's
will is accepted freely as the determinant of action because
the child trusts his parents and implicitly accepts their
1 System der Stttenlehre, pt. iii. ch. iii. § 29.

128 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

superiority in wisdom and insight. In such voluntary
obedience, therefore, the child does freely what is at the
same time imposed on him as a law independent of his
own inclinations. Of course, when the parent's declared
wish coincides with the child's present inclination there
is no conscious obedience. Obedience is felt when the
child rejects the present inclination in favour of the
higher and wider motive of doing what the parent
desires, because the parent is implicitly accepted as the
rightful judge. Fichte makes the suggestive remark
that " if anything proves that goodness is inherent in
human nature, it is this obedience." ^

As the child's intelligence grows, that which is at first
but implicitly and instinctively felt gradually becomes
understood. So the child finds in his experience justi-
fication for his former implicit trust in his parents' love
and wisdom ; or, it may be, he finds it shaken or shat-
tered. Everything depends upon which of these two
convictions is borne in upon him. Will his growing
habit of obedience to his parents advance with the
recognition and acceptance of a moral law of which they
are to him the mouthpiece, or will there be an ever-
widening gulf between his love for his parents and his
respect for either their goodness or their wisdom or both ?
For in the latter case the inconsistencies in the parents'
commands, and the want of fixed principle in their rule,
cannot but become increasingly evident to him. Here
we are at the very core of education, and there parents
must inevitably be found. On them depends whether
the child shall go steadily on from obedience to them,
through ever fuller and freer acceptance of the rule
of duty, to the pursuit of all that is noble and good

1 Ibid.

WHAT ARE THE MEANS? 129

and true — that "service of God" which "is perfect
freedom."

As authority, therefore, is the first means of education,
so obedience is the first duty of children, and, as was
shown in the previous chapter, throughout life the duty
of ever-widening obedience remains as an essential
condition of growth in freedom. From the root of
obedience spring other virtues, but where it is absent
they have no root, for virtue apart from the feeling of
obligation to do what is judged right is meaningless.
An understanding of what obedience implies and of how
best to cultivate it is, therefore, the fundamental need of
parents. Similarly, a clear conception of the range and
kind of obedience demanded by the end of education in
the relation of pupil and teacher is of the first importance
to a schoolmaster. Obviously, the two are not on the
same footing. Though for certain purposes the law may
regard a schoolmaster as being in loco parentis^ yet that
is only a figure of speech, for the bond of natural relation-
ship, which is the root of the matter in the one case, is
absent in the other. The family is a natural society, the
school an artificial one. Doubtless, in a boarding school
many of the elements of the common life of members of
a family are present which are absent in a day school, but
the inmates are not held together by blood-relationship,
and the membership of each in his own family still
remains intact, though it may seem to have sunk for a
time beneath the surface of life. Every attempt to
ignore the differences, and to identify school life with
family life, is patently artificial, and so introduces a false
note into the relations which prevail in the school in
which it is made.

The obedience of child for parent should grow in

I30 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

character with his growth, taking root in the vaguest
feeling, and becoming ever more conscious of itself,
rational, and self-chosen. The parent has natural trust
and affection on his side, and has simply to avoid shock-
ing and violating them. The schoolmaster, on the other
hand, stands in no such primary advantageous position.
Recognition of his superior wisdom and of his loving
care is not embedded in the very depths of the child's
being. He has the positive task of winning trust, not
merely the negative one of avoiding its loss. The
authority he can rightly exercise is that which is his in
so far as he is the delegate of the parent, and that which
inheres in his position as the representative of a com-
munity which has an end of its own, and therefore, the
right to impose on its members such laws and regulations
as facilitate the attainment of that end. Such rules,
however, are limited in their scope. They relate only to
so much of the life of the child as is his life as a schoolboy,
and that is not the whole of his life. But no part of his
life is outside the sphere of his membership of the family.
Further, the authority of school is much more external
than is that of the family, just because the child never
feels himself a part of his school in the same sense, or to
the same degree, as he feels himself one with his home.
The school rule is, therefore, less easily absorbed into the
spiritual nature than is that of a wise and loving family.
It is apt to affect the manners more than the heart, and
to be disregarded when its actual imposition comes to an
end. This is, necessarily, more the case with day schools,
where the family influence continues in full force side by
side with that of the school, and usually overshadows
it ; but it is true in its degree of all schools, even of
those which have the strongest traditions.

WHAT ARE THE MEANS? 131

It follows that this root of all virtue — obedience —
must be carefully cherished in the family, if education is
to attain its end. Only when this is the case is voluntary
obedience likely to become a powerful spring of action
in school. We hear of children who are obedient in
school and unruly at home ; but if the unruliness is of
the heart and not simply exuberance of vitality, the
obedience can be little more than external and temporary.
The securing of even such obedience is necessary for the
sake of other members of the school, but it has in itself
little or no educative power over the individual.

The basis of voluntary obedience we have found in
trust. This trust must, therefore, be assumed as the :
natural and normal relation between educator and child, j
This consideration at once rejects the idea that a parent [
should reason with his child as to whether it should obey
his commands. Such action implies that the child does
not trust the parent, but either holds that its own judge-
ment is at least of equal value, or assumes that questions
of right and wrong are mere matters of indifferent
choice. As a child grows in intelligence it will seek
enlightenment on many problems of conduct which it
cannot solve for itself, and similar problems may be tact-
fully suggested when the child's advance in the spiritual
life seems to demand it, and then the question of why ?
can be discussed. But no question of whether a com- '
mand should be obeyed or not should ever be permitted i
either in family or in school.

As has been said, however, the trust which is the basis
of voluntary obedience may be shaken or destroyed by
unwise rule. Of such unwisdom superficial expediency
is the most prolific cause. Parents and teachers who
have never given serious thought to what they desire

132 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

their children to become, and the means to attain that
desire, give commands on the spur of the moment which
either they cannot insist on at all, or which they will
shrink — and, in all probability, with justice — from
insisting on uniformly. Those who find most frequent
/ occasion to resort to punishment for the enforcement of
their commands are just those whose rule is the most
incompetent from this very cause of absence of convic-
tion and of principle. Vacillation and alternation of
severity and indulgence are antagonistic to the growth of
the trustful obedience which promotes freedom. In
every way obedience and authority are correlative. The
goodness — or badness — of the one implies the goodness
— or badness — of the other.

More than kindly and consistent authority, securing
willing and regular obedience is, however, necessary if
the process of education is to lead the child from obedi-
ence to parents to that obedience to the law of God which
is " perfect freedom." The divine law is the summary
expression of all that is good and true ; obedience to it
means harmony with the ideal of human life. Authority
and obedience, as has been said, should not cover the
whole of life, but only intervene when inclination prompts
the child to do anything that would hinder his spiritual
advance. It does not follow that education has nothing
to do with the greater part of life. Authority is a
fundamental means of education, but not its only means :
it is the foundation on which all other means are based
remove it, and the whole structure falls to pieces ; educa-
tion disappears. Unless obedience pass through its
progressive stages neither advice and suggestion nor
instruction can bear the fruit education seeks to produce.
The increasingly conscious setting of the heart upon

WHAT ARE THE MEANS? 133

righteousness is the presupposition of any successful
process of education.

Granted that, and granted that the inculcation of true
obedience is the only way in which this process can be
begun, the guiding principle of all other forms of direc-
tive effort must be sought in the conception of positive
freedom, showing itself in both general and particular
efficiency of life. Educational effort is successful in
proportion as it evokes desire and effort ; it is justified
in so far as it directs that desire and effort towards an
approved end. Guidance in life is, therefore, given not
only by authority laying down the course to be followed,
but by whatever suggests that course, whether directly
by example or teaching, or indirectly by the simple hold-
ing up of an object to be secured and leaving the person
who is being educated to devise the means. The dis-
tinction between all these forms of direction is sharp and
precise only in an abstract analysis : in concrete practice
they continually intermingle. Little effort is evoked
unless a desirable object is in view, and the amount of
direction required when once that object has become a
leading purpose varies continually, and is sought in every
available form. Nor is the element of authority absent
from most guidance. In all teaching there is authority
whenever there is the assertion or assumption of any
distinction between right and wrong, true and false.
And every piece of advice is a hypothetical direction : If
you would attain such a result, follow such a course.
But there is no compulsion, and obedience to this kind of
authority is markedly voluntary. It has passed from
obedience to the command of another to obedience to a
law freely adopted by the higher self. Life cannot be
divided into compartments in which obedience and free

134 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

initiative respectively have unhindered play, and nothing
shows more plainly that obedience is not alien to freedom
than the willingness of each one of us to follow the
directions of another when we are convinced that they
will lead to the satisfaction of our desires.

There is, then, in all guidance an authoritative
element. But there is also in the response an element of
free activity, provided that the end in view is compre-
hended and desired. Then the guidance also is desired
and sought. The separation of constraint from free
guidance comes just here : the former is needed when no
desire for the immediate end to be sought has been
excited : only the latter is required when it has. In the
actual practice of schools the former has loomed inordi-
nately large, just because the desires of the pupils to learn
the lessons set them, and to obey the rules of the school,
have not been aroused. It is evident that much of this
compulsion was uneducative, as it remained to the end
what it was at the beginning — a mere outward bond of
servitude which failed to furnish principles for self-
guidance. On the other hand, the disciples of Rousseau,
with their sensitive shrinking from compulsion, go to
the other extreme, and fail to cultivate self-control,
because they leave far too much to the immediate choice
— or, rather, caprice — of the child. Locke has well
said : " He that has found a way, how to keep up a
child's spirit, easy, active, and free ; and yet, at the same
time, to restrain him from many things he has a mind to,
and to draw him to things that are uneasy to him ; he,
I say, that knows how to reconcile these seeming contra-
dictions, has, in my opinion, got the true secret of
education." ^

^ Thoughts concerning Education, § 46.

I

WHAT ARE THE MEANS? 135

The kind of conduct which a child is to follow must be
indicated and, if needs be, enforced, by those in charge
of his education — by his parents primarily, and secon-
darily by those to whom his parents partially entrust him.
What he is to learn — or, at any rate, to study — must also
be decided in general by the same authorities, though in
this the school, as embodying expert experience and
knowledge, has a more powerful influence — an influence
often unwisely exercised in the past, and by no means
clear in its promptings in the present. In a broad sense,
the community also has a voice in both these decisions.
Both the conduct inculcated and the studies recom-
mended or enforced reflect, more or less truly and
adequately, the common opinion of the age and country.
In whatever proportions these determinants of the form
of the education of any individual child, or class of
children, are efl^ective, the result is that a scheme is
devised by the educative agents, and not by the child to
be educated. If there is no such general scheme there
can be no education, for then everything is left to chance,
and training is absent. The child's freedom, therefore,
must be exercised within the limits of the ordained
scheme. He must obey the laws recognized as of bind-
ing obligation by the society in which he lives, nor do
they cease to be laws when, having recognized their truth
and wisdom, he accepts them as the private guiding
principles of his own life. Simply, the individual will
has been harmonized with the common will.

Such laws are necessarily of a very general character,
as they are applicable to all conduct. Within their
range many purposes may be pursued, and in the choice
of these every individual is necessarily a free agent. No
one can compel any one else to desire and seek any end

136 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

whatsoever. All that can be done is to present or sug-
gest the purpose in as attractive a form, and in as forceful
a way, as possible. And both what is an attractive form,
and what is superior force, in any one case can only be
inferred from knowledge of the individual in question.
Doubtless there are classes of incentive which normally
appeal to the young at successive ages, and a more exact
knowledge of what these are may be reached by extended
observation. But within those classes there will be many
differences in the stimulating power of particular objects
relatively to various individuals.

This is true both in the domain of conduct and in that
of learning. One will feel most strongly the glory of
courage, another the beauty of beneficence ; one will
respond to the allurements of literature, another to those
of mathematics, a third to the calls of practical work.
Whatever the scheme, then, it must, even if drawn out
for a single individual, be flexible enough to allow for
the free exercise of this relative selection of purposes,
and every educator ought continually to bear in mind
that in this matter he can only suggest and inspire, and
that his ability to do even that depends upon his personal
relations with those he is training, and upon the strength
with which he himself feels different moral and intel-
lectual incentives.

When the scheme is a common one intended to be
applicable to whole classes of the community the need
for flexibility, both in its conception and in its applica-
tion, is yet more imperative. To impose on all and
sundry a cut and dried scheme is an exercise of authority
in education for which no justification can be found. It
assumes uniformity where reality shows endless variety.
Its inevitable result is that the majority of those on whom

WHAT ARE THE MEANS? 137

it is forced find in it but feeble incentives, and draw the
real inspiration of their lives from sources outside it. A
very rigid and constraining home discipline has often
been known to fail to educate the children as responsible
moral beings ; a rigid insistence on the learning of set
facts has ever failed to inspire in most pupils the desire to
know them.

Not only are the same principles applicable to educa-
tive guidance in conduct and in learning, but the two
cannot be separated. Can virtue be taught.^ If not, it
cannot be learnt ; for teaching is nothing but guidance
of the learning of another. If the question be approached
from this side it is easier to avoid some dangerous mis-
conceptions. Virtue is seen only in action, and, there-
fore, can be learnt only by action.

" The moral sense grows but by exercise." ^
Morality is skill in conduct, and can no more be acquired
without constant practice than can skill in any form of
practical activity, such as playing the violin. But it is
not mere practice which gives skill. That may simply
petrify faults.

'' Thought is the soul of act." -

So the practice must be critically examined, that defects
may be noted for amendment. Such critical examination
takes us into the theory of the activity in which we are
attempting to become skilful. But a study of theory
apart from the practice will not give skill; and the theory
remains apart from the practice, although they may go on
side by side, so long as there is no definite appeal to
theory to indicate the mode of amending a definite fault
or of acquiring a definite excellence.

1 Browning : The Ring and the Book, The Pope, I. 141 5.

2 Ibid. : Zordello, bk. v.

138 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

This analysis gives us the true place and function of
definite teaching on moral and religious duties. When
the need for it is felt by an individual then its supply is of
educative value : it satisfies an experienced want and
responds to a definite enquiry. Conceptions of virtues,
and rules of duty to God and man, may be expounded
without the slightest effect on action. Only when they
can be appealed to in order to solve a real moral problem
are they effective in determining conduct.

There is in this nothing peculiar to teaching about
morality : it applies to all teaching. Only when we feel
a doubt do we call on our intellectual stores to help us to
solve it by supplying a precedent or suggesting an
analogy. When in no perplexity we act on habit, and
on impulse and instinct. The more intimate the action
is to ourselves — which is practically to say, the more
emotional stress it occasions — the stronger are the impul-
sive forces of instinct and habit, the weaker is mere
knowledge to inhibit it. " Impulses vary, in their
driving force and in the depth of the nervous disturbance
which they cause, in proportion, not to their importance
in our present life, but to the point at which they
appeared in our evolutionary past. . . . We can only with
difficulty resist the instincts of sex and food, of anger
and fear, which we share with the higher animals. It is,
on the other hand, difficult for us to obey consistently
the impulses which attend on the mental images formed
by inference and association." ^

Men have always been able to see the better while they

followed the worst course, and the young are still less

governed by intellectual concepts or statements of

abstract rules than are their elders. Those whose lives

^ Graham Wallas : Human "Nature in Politics, pp. 40-41.

WHAT ARE THE MEANS? 139

are determined mainly by intellect and logic are, indeed,
a small minority even among men whose intellectual
culture has been the most extended. Those who have
learnt more from life than from books act on a mass of
motives and feelings aroused by the situation as a whole,
and allowing in an instinctive kind of way for peculiari-
ties of which the strict application of logical principles
would take no account. Not explicit theoretical know-
ledge, nor power of rigid reasoning, is the chief determi-
nant of conduct among adults, and still less among
children. To the majority of people of all social classes,
and to every child in every class, what Messrs. Reynolds
and Woolley say about the ordinary working man is
entirely applicable. "He acts much on impulse and
on the inherited impulses which go by the name of
instinct ; and his impulses and instincts are powerful
in action according as they are primitive, and have
been acquired by his race far back in its evolutionary
past." ^

To give unsought information about moral questions
which are closely connected with natural instinct — such
as those of sex — is to neglect this law of mental life, and
to forget that the inevitable tendency of a deliberate
direction of the attention of the young to such matters
is both to evoke the instinct and to strengthen it by
setting the mind to dwell upon ideas connected with it.
To insist that purity is a law of God, and a duty both to
others and to ourselves, is one thing : to give more or
less detailed information on the physiology and hygiene
of impurity is quite another. The one sets a positive
rule in its context in the spiritual life and absorbs it into
the general religious motive : the other treats of a nega-
1 Seems So ! ch. 1 4.

I40 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

tive rule in more or less isolation from the spiritual life,
and in close connexion with the material life. To warn
privately an individual seen to be in moral danger, and
bound to the educator by strong bonds of personal affec-
tion and trust, and to give collective instruction and
admonition to a whole group of children or adolescents,
with at least some of whom no such close personal rela-
tions exist, are quite different things. Similar considera-
tions are of weight in other cases where impulse or
instinct is the motive-force of temptation. The fostering
of love of God and of neighbour is a positive thing, but
one not to be accomplished by precept. Suggestion
through personal character and influence and through
the general atmosphere of the educative community is
alone effective.

Intellectual comprehension of doctrines of morality
and religion is, then, operative educationally only when
they are taken up as guiding principles into the spiritual
life, and become identified with personal experiences and
purposes. Without this they are only verbal, and not
real, knowledge : they may be talked about, but are not
practised. Nor does the power to talk of them give the
power to practise them at will, any more than power to
describe the structure of a violin and the way in which it
should be played gives the power to play it. Power to
act — that is, skill — comes only through intelligently
considered and criticized practice.

This distinction runs through everything we learn.
The common separation of subjects of study into ' real '
and ' verbal ' has no justification. It is not in the matter
studied, but in the mode of study, that the distinction
holds. Any subject is a verbal one to a learner whenever m
his vocabulary outruns his ideas. Whether those ideas

WHAT ARE THE MEANS? 141

are of his own conduct, or of the chemical action of one
substance on another, or of a law of physics, or of a
proposition in geometry, if his words express no real
thought his knowledge is merely verbal. Of course,
strictly it is an abuse of terms — though one sanctioned
by the custom of schools and examinations — to call such
psittacism ' knowledge ' at all. Such sham knowledge
can give no guidance in life, and, therefore, it has neither
cultural nor utilitarian value. It is mere lumber — the
erudition of the pedant which never leads to anything
beyond itself. It has, therefore, no part or lot in true
education, however large it may loom in what commonly
goes under that name. Here, as elsewhere, it adds much
to clearness of thought to insist that not all efforts
intended to educate really do so, but only those which
actually have a share in shaping positively the life of the
individual whose education is in question. Possibly no
efforts directed towards a group are really educative in
the case of every member of that group. However wide
an objective our efforts may have, effective education
remains, and must ever remain, an individual work, and
that simply because each person lives his own private life
with his own purposes and aspirations.

A child, then, is educated just as far as in some way he
himself acts in the process, and no further. So it is true,
though it is not the whole truth, that all education is
self-education. In so far as the would-be educator
inspires to effort for some end felt to be of worth, he is
a real educator. That is to say that the universal feature
in all true education is the cultivation of the power to
work ; for work is nothing but the putting forth of effort
to secure a return esteemed worthy of it.

Power to work, however, does not come by wishing

142 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

for it : it needs, above all else, the support of habit. To
train this habit in the young is the true justification of
constraint in all that is not directly connected with ques-
tions of moral right and wrong. Therefore, schools are
not only justified in constraining their pupils to work at
their lessons, but they neglect their duty if they fail to
exercise this constraint. Habit enables all of us to do
much work to which we feel no special attraction, and
the result of which is not sufficiently desired to prompt
us by itself to the effort. Indeed, this is probably the
character of the greater part of the work of the majority
of men, and it tends to become more so as they advance in
life. Habit, rather than enthusiastic desire, then carries
them on. But, then the habit has strengthened with
years, and the enthusiasm has waned, relatively if not
absolutely. In childhood, the habit of work is but just
coming into being ; it has to be nourished and strength-
ened in every possible way. But it grows in proportion
as it is exercised, and frequent exercise is a matter of
choice. So that tasks which are done only under com-
pulsion do little to form^ the habit of work ; those which
are accepted as really worth doing are practised both more
frequently and with greater intensive efibrt, and they
gather round themselves many and varied delightful
feelings of conquest and satisfaction of inclination. In
the former case, the motive force is external to the task
itself : it may be desire to please parent or teacher, to
win a reward, to surpass others ; or it may be fear of
punishment ; or, again, it may be merely dull and
apathetic acquiescence in the mysterious ills of life — a
kind of juvenile fatalism. Whatever it is, it does not
involve any liking for that particular kind of work, and
it does not inspire effort to do it as well as possible, but

WHAT ARE THE MEANS? 143

only to make the most specious appearance possible —
often a very different thing.

None of this is educationally worthless, for in life as
we know it all such motives have a place. But were it
all like that the lot of man would be indeed unhappy.
There is for all something better — some real hope and
allurement for which to strive for its own sake. And it
is just there that we find life really worth living.
Naturally men strive for more of this, for this is felt to
be increase of life. And it is this which inspires the
learner in the latter case — when the task is in itself
acceptable because it is a means to an end felt to be in
itself desirable. Then the desire to know is operative :
in the former case the desire is only to appear to know.

In constraining pupils to work, then, the positive
constraint of free choice and felt worth is more efficacious
than the negative constraint of external compulsion.
The more the latter is kept in reserve, or unostentatiously
conjoined with the former, the better the result. For,
never let it be forgotten, it is not what a schoolboy can
write in answer to examination questions, but what he
can do with his life in the world, which is the test of his
education as a whole, and of his school training in so far
as that has contributed to the result.

The boy, however, is not by instinct a consistently
strenuous coadjutor in his own education. He may like
his work, but is seldom averse from a holiday. This,
too, is good, for in the free activity of the holiday the
boy — like the adult — feels that he is getting more of life,
that he is enjoying a fuller and richer experience, because
he is himself determining his actions and pursuits. Yet,
when the work demanded by family and school is felt to
be worth doing, the boy — again like the adult — is quite

144 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

willing to return to it. Without expressing it to him-
self he implicitly recognizes that work adds zest to
holidays, and that on each successive holiday it is a self
richer in capacities of living that has resulted from his
work. He may feel this generally and very really, if
quite vaguely, and yet it takes little to evoke the volatile
liveliness and frivolity natural to his stage of develop-
ment. To learn to work means to learn to keep such
impulses within reasonable bounds. In other words, it
means to learn to concentrate the mind on the task in
hand. This is the most important formal lesson the
school can teach, and school has much greater oppor-
tunities for teaching it than has the family.

Our own experience shows us that such concentration
is most easy when we are strongly drawn towards the
work in hand, and when the doing of it demands some
practical activity on our part. For example, it is easier
to keep the thoughts from wandering when one is writing
than when one is listening. In the former case one
dwells on what seems to oneself to be important, and
constructs the means to carry out the purpose of express-
ing one's own thought clearly. In the latter case the
course and rate of thought are determined, and all that
is asked of one is to follow intelligently the working out
of the ideas of another. No doubt, this latter is neces-
sary. We should make but small advance did we not
receive the thoughts of others. But we make equally
small advance if we simply receive them, or even store
them up for future exhibition. Only in so far as we
re-think them for ourselves, and find their bearing on our
own problems, do we benefit from ever having heard
them. We only trouble, however, to worry over the
thoughts of others when we can see — dimly, it may be —

WHAT ARE THE MEANS? 145

that they are likely to help us in our own thinking about
what we feel concerns us.

Children, then, are trained in mental concentration in
proportion as they are kept mentally active by a definite
object. Having but immature minds and very small
experience, they need the help of suggestion, and the
stimulus of definitely raised problems, to take up into the
living streams of their lives the ideas which they find in
books, or which are presented to them by word of mouth.
This, then, is the most important part of their intellectual
growth, and to this all imparting of information is sub-
sidiary, and should be ancillary. Not what has been
presented, nor what is reproduced, but what has been so
assimilated that it can be used intelligently, is the
measure of what has been taught. The memory which
teaching should most try to strengthen is the power of
effective use. The talent put out at usury, not that
hidden in a napkin to be exhibited on demand, is the true
image of the educative function of learning.

Children will learn to concentrate their minds on the
task in hand — that is to say, to work — in so far as they
are encouraged to do what seems to them worth doing,
not simply because it is enjoyable in itself, but chiefly
because it enables them to get something they want.
That something is conscious power. As childhood is
left behind, therefore, it becomes less possible to draw a
hard and fast psychological line between work and play.
Play has its end in present enjoyment : work looks
beyond itself. But in many a game a boy works hard to
acquire a skill which is, it may be, the chief desire of his
life. His 'play' is then his real work. Yet, from the
point cf view of life the game is not work, because it
produces nothing outside itself. When the relation

146 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

between the activities which enrich life and the recreation
which stimulates it is grasped by the youth, the relatively
greater importance of the former becomes manifest to
him. Precept will not do this, nor will compulsion.
The great attraction of skilled play is that it does lead to
something worth having — to a power which it demands
much persistent effort to acquire. Its glamour is much
more in this sense of effectiveness than in any immediate
enjoyment, though that also may be very keen owing to
the free bodily exercise the game involves.

For such activity the growing boy has an almost
insatiable desire ; for the consciousness of increasing
skill and power his need is equally imperative. No
matter to what social class a child belongs by birth and
training, he is still a young human being with the
primeval impulse to do things with his bodily members,
and to do them well. If gratification of those impulses
be offered in no other way it must be found exclusively
in games, or in less desirable forms of physical action
which at least accomplish something. The obvious
educative outlet, in addition to games, is by various
forms of constructive work, in which energy is con-
sumed, skill is acquired, and a desirable product results.
Here is the rational antidote to over-estimation of games.
Ordinary lessons will never provide a counter-attraction,
because they do not respond to the same natural demands.

Yet here again it is essential that the work should be
the individual's own work, and it is not his own work if
he simply carry out the directions of another. He is
willing enough to accept such directions when he feels
the need of help : he never objects to the instructions of
his coach in cricket. But unless he be engaged in con-
structing something ' out of his own head,' or in prac-

WHAT ARE THE MEANS? 147

tising an operation which he sees to be necessary to such
construction, it is not his work, and has for him but little
attractive force. There are many boys and girls who
do most of their thinking in close connexion with the
work of their hands, and all do a considerable part of it in
that practical way.

We have seen, moreover, that it is easier to acquire the
power of continued application when one is actively
employed. So here, too, practical constructive work
makes a strong claim to recognition as a means of educa-
tion. In years of boyhood and girlhood the natural
instincts demand such expression most strenuously, and
through it the educative aim of bringing the will of the
child into active co-operation with that of the educator
is most surely secured.

The question, however, of whether such occupations
will be regarded as real work or as play, on the same level
as cricket or hockey, is an important and a difficult one,
and one which leads us into the very heart of the problem
of what children should be set to learn. To acquire the
power to work and to keep on working intelligently is
the primary aim, but in itself it is formal. It is a valu-
able asset in whatever line of life is afterwards entered,
but it does not give insight into the requirements of any
special mode of action. Each occupation has to be
learnt, and to learn well demands the habits of application
and of intelligent criticism of effort. So much, it may
be said, educative work of any kind will give. But we
have insisted that behind this must be the spring of
desire, and that the stronger the desire, and the more
directly it bears on the task itself, the more successful and
educative is the effort. Speaking broadly, the educa-
tional desires of any social class are in relation to the

148 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

conventional standards of value in that class. Children
from their earliest years live in homes and move in social
circles in which it is continually taken for granted, both
in act and in speech, that certain things are worth doing
and knowing, and certain others are not. This is the
positive side of the influence. But there is an equally
pervasive negative side. It is equally taken for granted
that the occupations and interests of a class lower in the
social scale have in them something debasing, while those
of a higher class are looked at with distrust and suspicion,
even if with some envy.

Thus the appeal of any subject to be learnt is likely
to be different to children of different social grades.
Though all have the same natural instincts, yet long
before the age of school lessons these have grown accus-
tomed to find exercise and satisfaction in diverse ways,
and to tend towards diverse ends. Tastes and aptitudes
and points of view have been developing from the cradle,
and constantly finding sustenance in family and social
life. In every English school some one social grade
preponderates, and in most schools it is exclusive, so that
this distinction of values in harmony with the opinions
and prejudices of various social classes is inherent in all
actual scholastic education. This affects directly, though
in a way impossible to state in explicit terms and doubt-
less to varying degrees, the response of the pupils to the
opportunities offered them. Thus, to the extent to which
the more prosperous social classes regard manual labour
as an inferior type of human effort, and assume that men
who work with their hands are on a stage of civiliza-
tion lower than their own, the children of those classes
are apt to look upon all manual occupations in school as
an inferior form of play, and generally to feel little or

WHAT ARE THE MEANS? 149

no inspiration to attain skill in them. They have not
been regarded at home as part of a liberal education. So
the boys will probably be almost ashamed to become
good workers in wood or iron, unless such work is very
directly connected with their own lives and interests, and
has in it no appearance of apprenticeship to a trade.
Any suspicion that it is meant to make them proficient
as manual workers is likely to be fatal in many cases, but
the idea of making things they themselves want is a
different matter. The manual work is still not regarded
in the way in which it is regarded by children of the
industrial classes, but it is something more than play,
and it may have the happy result of convincing some
boys well endowed with riches that though such work
may not be necessary to gain a livelihood it may yet be
worth doing for the very solid satisfaction it brings. For
it must be remembered that among all classes are to be
found children of a very practical turn of mind, who will
do either some form of physical work or no work at all
that is worth mentioning. Capacity for intellectual or
aesthetic culture is not an invariable accompaniment of
well-filled pockets.

This class attitude towards various studies is operative
throughout. Mr. Herbert Spencer thought it absurd
that a boy of the upper classes should be taught Latin
" simply in conformity to public opinion . . . that he may
have ' the education of a gentleman ' — the badge mark-
ing a certain social position, and bringing a consequent
respect,"^ and he himself proceeded to enquire "What
knowledge is of most worth ? " in a community per-
meated by material civilization and largely engaged in
commercial and industrial pursuits. However cogent

1 Education, ch. i.

ISO WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

his arguments may be as to what knowledge is required
in the nation, they do not touch the question as to what
should be taught to individuals ; and it is individuals —
not communities — that have to be taught. Many of his
examples illustrate the advisability of seeking expert
advice, and consequently imply the need of specializa-
tion. Putting this on one side, the refusal to recognize
the bearing of the public opinion of his social circle on
the kinds of things a boy or youth is willing to learn can
only be explained on the assumption that teaching is held
to be a matter in which the person taught is indifferent
to what he is taught — an assumption utterly at variance
with the doctrine that teaching is the systematic culture
of the mental powers preached in a later chapter of the
same book. For the mental powers with which the
school has to deal are not abstract and empty forms, but
dynamic forces tending in certain directions and confined
to certain paths, and these directions and paths are those
approved by the common opinion of the social class in
which childhood has been passed.

Desire and effort are inspired by that which is seen to
be pleasantly or usefully related to the actual life. The
young do not look far ahead, and as far as they do look
it is down a vista of a similar general nature to that of
their past experience seen in memory. The question of
what to teach in order to give those taught the greatest
possible number of fruitful incentives cannot, then, be
answered simply by a consideration of the contents of
the various branches of knowledge. The mode and
extent of the relation of such knowledge with the actual
and the probable future lives of the pupils should also be
taken into account, or again the fundamental error is
made of assuming that life is formed by environment

WHAT ARE THE MEANS? 151

and has no share or lot in choosing from among the
possibilities before it what shall really become part of
itself. Or, to put it in another way, incentive is found,
not when something is simply offered for acceptance, but
when the dynamic forces which have grown up in life are
already attuned to that kind of object. Incentive is a
relation between cognate terms.

If, then, nothing in the actual life of a boy predisposes
him to desire the kind of teaching offered him by his
school it is unlikely that he will become keen about it,
or, if he do, that the interest will live long. Of course,
it is not meant that everything that fills a boy with desire
has been spoken of at home as worth having. There
may be springs in every heart which remain hidden till
some new experience calls them forth. But, speaking
generally, the new experience is most likely to be
an awakening one when it is at any rate of the same
general kind as those which are accepted as worth having
in the boy's social circle. Further, a newly felt desire
requires nursing, and in ordinary minds is easily crushed
by want of sympathy. The boy or girl needs the sup-
port of such sympathy, and seldom puts forth much
effort when it is withheld. Interest in a new subject of
study is, however, encouraged out of school only when
it is one which meets with out-of-school approval. The
subject which is scouted by parents or friends, or by the
public opinion of the pupils freely expressed outside the
class-room, will be seriously studied by very few.

Hence, for the sake of their own work the schools
would do well to regard the feelings and aspirations of
the social class from which their pupils are drawn. Only
to the extent to which they do so are their exertions
likely to affect the main current of the children's lives,

152 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

arouse in them permanent interests, enlarge their sym-
pathies, and raise their standards of value. As condi-
tions of life change, aspirations are modified, not so much
in essence as in form. What is taught in schools should
be modified, too, in harmony with such changes in the
direction of public life. Tradition should not count
absolutely, but only relatively in so far as the change in
public attitude is slow or rapid. A course of school
study which broke as absolutely as possible with the past
would be as much out of relation with actual life as one
which obstinately refused to admit any change. Adjust-
ment is never revolution, but always the change of the
permanent in school in relation to the change in the
permanent outside.

So long as the common conception of knowledge was
that it was something to be acquired from the past, and
that the task of the learner was to gather and store the
thoughts and opinions of the wise men of old, the task
of determining what to teach was a simple one. The
outlines of the contents of a liberal culture were accepted
everywhere through many centuries. Attention was
then directed towards the perfecting of a method of
imparting that knowledge which assumed throughout the
unquestionable authority of the old masters of thought.
Very successfully was the task completed, and the medi-
aeval scholastic method was a very perfect instrument
for what it was designed to accomplish. It trained the
power to make use of authorities to support theses of
aU kinds. It is, indeed, the best example of formal
mental discipline recorded by history. Its very success
led to its own destruction, and that because no essentially
formal training could permanently satisfy the aspirations
and longings of the spirit of man. The habit of ques-

WHAT ARE THE MEANS? 153

tioning theses and weighing arguments was at the
disposal of human curiosity to learn more about man
and the world, and the outcome of the mediaeval system
was that while mediocre minds became dull pedants the
choicer spirits burst the bonds placed by the accepted
authority of the past on the thought of the present.
This was inevitable as soon as the re-discovery of for-
gotten writings of the revered age was found to raise
again problems which tradition had buried. The spirit '
of questioning was aroused, and was insatiable. That
spirit is the essence of the modern thinker's attitude
towards learning, in which all results of human thought,
or at any rate the formulas which express them, are
regarded as, more or less, always on their trial.

This questioning, and in a sense sceptical, spirit has
permeated the various classes of the community to
different degrees and in different ways. Credulity — or
acceptance of statements without evidence, and simply
because they are commonly received — marks the great
majority of mankind, if not the whole of it, in subjects
outside the range of their own active interests. But
within that range a spirit of sceptical enquiry is at work.
Still, it leads to unsatisfying results so far as it is unin-
formed and under the sway of prejudice or passion.
Among the working classes, for example, the questioning
spirit is very active in all matters of social and economic
relations. The questioning is largely a groping in the
dark, and whatever promises to throw light on such
problems is welcomed, provided there is awakened no
suspicion that the ideals and prejudices of another class
are being imposed on them as truths. The schools for
their children would, then, most readily fit their work
into the actual current of working-class life if they related

154 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

it to social and economic interests. These are wide
enough to cover all that it is desirable to attempt to teach.
History, economic and historical geography, and litera-
ture, show the spirit of man dealing with the problems
of life in practice and in theory, and so have a social refer-
ence throughout. But it is the real history of social life
— the aspirations and struggles of peoples and classes
for ends desired, though not always clearly conceived,
the advance of man's conquest of nature — not political
or constitutional records, nor the loves and hates of
monarchs, that furnishes the kind of material needed.
The result desired should be widening and deepening
ideas, ever growing in justice, as to the inter-relation and
inter-dependence of classes in all times and places, not a
knowledge of ' facts ' which could with equal profit be
taught to parrots or magpies.

The method of teaching should be in harmony with
the end sought, which is the giving of greater cohesion,
point, and clearness, to thought on those social questions
— of morality, of relations of classes, of the effects of
Acts of Parliament, of the conflicting policies offered
for their acceptance at the polls — which are the chief
interests of the working-classes outside the economic
questions concerned with earning as good a living as
possible, which of necessity rank first with them, but
which intermingle in all sorts of ways with social
questions.

Whatever promises to fit a child more efficiently for
earning money will always be welcomed and valued by
parents and friends who know but too well the constant
strain of living and supporting a family on a weekly wage
which illness or accident may at any time intermit. So
it is that in working-class circles good reading and writ-

WHAT ARE THE MEANS? 155

ing and correct working of straightforward sums related
to every-day transactions are valued. " 'Tisn't what
you learns to school as helps 'ee, not wi' the likes o' us,
so long as you can read an' write an' reckon a bit, an'
speak up for yourself ; 'tis experience — seeing life an'
what 'tis like, an' thee casn' see too much o' it too early "
says one of the working men whose views of life are so
frankly expounded at first hand in Seems So ! ^ So long
as this reproach is generally felt to be just by working
class parents, so long will they fail to value the elementary
schools, and will withdraw their children from them at
the earliest permissible age, irrespective of whether or
not they have found suitable occupations for them. But
if the elementary schools, instead of borrowing the ideals
of the secondary schools, themselves largely a reflex of
those of the great public schools, would frankly accept as
their starting-point the ideals of the classes for whose
service they exist, the reproach would be removed, the
confidence of the home circle would be gradually gained,
and, as a consequence, the desire of the children to learn
would be so increased that much more could be taught in
the same time than is now found practicable. To
lengthen school life for working class children will be of
no avail and will only arouse the antagonism of the
parents unless what the school offers meets what the
children desire, and that largely reflects what the parents
think worth having. Forms of manual training, deter-
mined by the common occupations of the district, should
hold an important place in every elementary school.
But the teaching must be such as aims at ingenuity and
initiative, as well as at executive ability. So only can
it train the intelligent workman. But the boy who

1 Ch. 5.

156 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

works intelligently also thinks intelligently, at least in
one department of life, and is consequently more able
to distinguish and reject unintelligent thinking on other
matters within his experience.

The power to sing, to draw, to enjoy good stories, is
inherent to some degree in all, and such occupations cover
the most usual means of adding pleasure to leisure. A
sympathetic teaching of them will win the general
approval of parents, and inspire effective working interest
in the pupils, when once the work of the school as a
whole appeals to those concerned as useful to the chil-
dren. Indeed, it is only the limited use of the word
which prevents people in general from calling such
acquirements themselves 'useful.' Nevertheless, they
are felt to have value.

A similar satisfaction of the natural curiosity of
children, and a like acquiescence on the part of the home,
awaits rational teaching about natural phenomena, sa
long as what is taught is rather how to learn than strings
of statements about matters which can be seen and
thought out by the children themselves.

It appears, then, that nominally the studies of elemen-
tary schools need little revision, except that manual work
should play a much more leading part than it now usually
does. History, Geography, Literature, Reading, Writ-
ing, Spelling, Composition, Nature Study, Drawing,
Music, all have a legitimate claim to inclusion. But
those names may cover what is held worthless by all
connected with those to whom it is offered, or what is
felt by them to be valuable. And unless appreciation be
secured the attempts of the school to teach can have but
little educative value. The unfavourable opinion voiced
in Seems So ! appears to be widely held, and the reason

I

I

WHAT ARE THE MEANS? 157

given is certainly the true one. " It offers the neatest
possible example of the folly of trying to force upon one
class the standards and ideals of another." ^ " It has
been assumed that the artisan is but a stunted and dis-
torted specimen of the small tradesman ; with the same
ideals, the same aspirations, the same limitations :
demanding the same moulding towards the fashioning
of a completed product." ^ So long as different classes
have different ideals, how can it be otherwise while the
determination of what elementary schools shall do is
wholly in the hands of men who are imbued with the
standards of the higher classes and have never doubted
the excellence of those standards for all mankind.''

That it is desirable from every point of view to bring
about a greater understanding and sympathy between
the great working classes and the ' higher ' classes against
whose supremacy and direction they chafe more and
more is undoubted, and to do this means to soften the
lines of demarcation between their ideals. But to make
the mass of the people dissatisfied with the schooling
provided for their children, and to compel them to accept
it whether they judge it good or bad — especially when
that schooling proudly, though unjustifiably, arrogates
to itself the name of ' education,' and so in word seems
to deny the right of parents to train their children — is
surely a way to widen the breach, not to close it. It
adds to the conviction that the directing classes are but
blind guides, and awakens the suspicion that the blind-
ness may be only assumed, and that the rulers are more
knaves than fools, seeking their own class interests. So
their attitude towards life's values is suspected and

^Ch. 5.

-Ch. 20. quoted from Masterman : The Condition of England.

158 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

rejected, and class antagonism becomes more intense and
narrow.

The problem of what will provide the most fruitful
incentives, and therefore should be taught in schools for
the middle classes, engaged in various grades of com-
mercial and industrial life and in professional life, is in
one way easier and in another way more difficult than is
that of the working-class school. Home opinion is less
critical of what the school offers, especially if it be the
traditional fare, so that active opposition is not likely to
be generally encountered. At the same time the intel-
lectual apathy of many homes predisposes their children
to regard school work as a bore, while the more frequent
opportunities for amusement act as a constant distraction,
and so increase the tendency to slackness. Moreover,
the different aspirations and needs of the various sections
of the middle classes render it difficult for schools to
meet fully the requirements of any. In towns the
remedy for this latter disadvantage might well be the
provision of several types of school, each of which would
adapt itself as closely as possible to the aspirations of
some one section. Such a distinction would also tend
to separate into different schools pupils who leave at
different ages to follow different pursuits. The children
of professional men would generally be preparing for a
course at a university or other place of higher instruc-
tion, and any pupils from other classes who were also
intended so to prolong their preparation for life would
naturally find their place in the same schools. For them
the home has conceived the ambition to lift them above
its own social grade, so that the fact that a more advanced
course is proposed for all is evidence that broadly similar
aspirations in regard to the children prevail in all the

I

WHAT ARE THE MEANS? 159

homes. It would tend to efficiency if no other pupils
were admitted to such schools, and if as a result the
numbers were small the cause of education would not
suffer. Such pupils should be so taught that as they
pass through youth they should more and more be able
to learn by themselves, which implies that they should
have both the desire to extend their knowledge in some
definite sphere and cultivated skill in doing so.

This would render practicable also as much differenti-
ation of study as the youth of the pupils render advisable.
Interest in social and economic questions and in the
artistic recreations of life should be present here as in
schools for the working classes, while interest in more
detached realms of intellectual culture, which can at the
most be awakened by schools whose pupils leave at
thirteen or fourteen, can and should be made wider and
deeper in schools which retain their scholars several more
years. The whole realm of intellectual interests, how-
ever, is too wide for anyone to be at home in all parts of
it, and this explains the need for specialized interest.
This is a need, not only imposed from without by the
wealth of matter, but also felt from within, as, for some
reason or another, greater value is given by an individual
student to some forms of learning than to others. But,
before such a call can be genuinely felt the whole field
must have been broadly surveyed. So only can breadth
of outlook and variety of interest be retained, and these
are indispensable to a sane culture. Nobody in our day
can be said to have a really liberal intellectual culture
who is ignorant of any of the great domains of human
thought. The student of the ' humanities ' must know
the general trend of ' scientific ' thought and speculation,
or he is out of touch with even the ' humanistic ' move-

i6o WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

ment of" the day ; while the student of the physical and
natural sciences cannot afford to be ignorant of the
religious, social, and economic, questions which agitate
men's minds, and which involve a knowledge of history
and literature. Schools of all grades, according to the
time and opportunity given them, are homes of liberal
culture to the extent to which they adapt this wide
outlook to that of the boys and girls they teach.

Schools of a different type — or, rather, of several
different types — are needed for the children of the com-
mercial and industrial classes who are intended to enter
pursuits similar to those of their parents. Here the
same general principles are operative, but the actual
subjects offered are likely to furnish incentives in pro-
portion as they have a recognizable relation to the
interests current at home, which constitute the intellec-
tual atmosphere in which the boy passes his out-of-school
life, and to the projects and aspirations which have grown
out of that spiritual environment. The orientation of
any subject should not conflict with that of the minds to
which it is offered. There is always a danger of being
misled by a fallacy of ambiguity in these matters, so as
to think that the study of any subject — e.g. History —
is always and necessarily of the same character because it
has the same name. In truth there are many aspects of
every subject according to the relation to human life and
effort which is made the directing force of the study, nor
can it be said that any one is, in itself, more liberalizing
than another. That mode of entry into any subject does
the most for culture which opens to the individual mind
the widest and highest vistas of life.

To what extent more direct technical teaching should
be given to those who desire it in an upper department

I

WHAT ARE THE MEANS? i6i

of a school is a matter of convenience. Whenever such
teaching is called for it should be available either in
special schools or in technical additions to ordinary-
schools. But the principles that specialization should
grow out of a wide survey of possibilities, and should
answer to a felt need, are as operative here as in schools
where the specialization has a less immediate application
in the real affairs of life.

A general survey of history should, for example,
precede the study of any special periods or topics, and,
on the other side of life's interests, a general view of the
natural world should be the root from which the study
of any particular science should spring. It is the
general nature of the world as it actually appears to the
child that should first be made intelligible to him, and
this cannot be done by dealing with one of its abstract
aspects. The aim should be that from the first it may
be viewed by the child as a concrete whole which limits
his actions on all sides, and which he can make an instru-
ment of his will only by understanding it and acting in
conformity to the laws which govern it. But all the
specific sciences are highly abstract. Chemistry, for
example, is concerned with certain modes of reaction
which in the real world are always found combined with
other reactions which form the subject matter of other
distinct branches of physical science. So, although the
sciences deal with concrete things, they deal with them
abstractly ; and to study one or two sciences gives but
a very partial and inadequate view of the actual course
of events in nature. The study of them should, there-
fore, be the response to enquiries raised in the mind by
a more concrete and general study which investigates
typical natural phenomena on every side. In such study

1 62 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

we take nature as we find it ; we do not abstract from
this or that process as not belonging to the special science
in hand. We make a kind of cross-section through the
sciences, but in doing so we get a true and intelligible
picture of nature as it is ; we view it as a whole, and
we discover in it system and mutual dependence. Such
study, carried out with some considerable thoroughness,
should precede all investigation of separate departments
of natural science ; for those are, after all, but artificial
distinctions made for the convenience of advanced
investigation. Only through such a course can
specialization rest upon a basis of culture, or avoid
giving prejudiced and distorted ideas of value.

Nor should the study of nature be divorced from that
of human effort. It should not confine itself to leading
the pupils to learn what investigation has taught man-
kind, but it should connect that learning with that
investigation. " Scientific truths are battles won " said
Descartes. Let those battles be described. Let the
young student hear of the arduous toil of the discoverer
— watch his progress, share his hopes, be downcast by
his failures, rejoice in his triumphs. Are not his
victories as interesting as those of the soldier, and of
infinitely greater moment to mankind.'* How is it that
the history commonly taught in schools pays little or no
attention to the former and revels in the latter .f*
Surely, the only answer is that it is the influence of a
bad tradition, dating from an age when science had not
yet begun her triumphant march. Yet, instead of
examples of unscrupulous ambition, fruitful in inflicting
untold ills on its victims, of hatred and fraud, and of
frequent futility — a fearful panorama even when relieved
by pictures of noble heroism and unselfish loyalty — what

WHAT ARE THE MEANS? 163

models of self-restraint, of patient and untiring persever-
ance, of simple and disinterested love of truth, does the
history of the advance of science present ! How much
more, too, are its results seen and felt in contemporary
life! Who can compare in importance the permanent
influence on mankind of any war, or of all the wars
which have devastated the world, with that of the
invention of the steam-engine or of the electric tele-
graph ? Teaching on such subjects, then, comes home
to the young. It gives them greater understanding of
the things amid which they live, it arouses admiration
for the less showy but more fruitful arts of peace, the
arts in which they themselves will take some part. It
shows man engaged in conquering nature — in wringing
her secrets from her, in using those secrets to harness
her to his chariot wheels. It shows him, in short,
fulfilling his destiny, and bending his environment to
his will. So it unifies the young student's growing
knowledge, helps him to see that man and nature are
together constituents of that world in which he, too, is
a living force, who though he can do little yet can do it
nobly. Thus accustomed to look at the history of the
past he then may learn also how men have ever been
prone to spend their force in internecine strife, and he
will, while admiring the heroic virtues which war calls
forth, yet see it in its true perspective, and largely
stripped of its glamour. So he may learn, while
sympathizing with those who fight for freedom and to
resist attack, to look upon successful aggression on
another nation as far less noble than successful attack
on the secrets of nature, and in the end, infinitely less
profitable.

The school tradition of the highest classes is strong

1 64 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

and conservative, and lays it down that school is less
concerned with learning than with the training of person-
ality, and that boarding schools best fulfil this function.
This is the strength of the public school system. The
boy goes probably to his father's old school, prepared to
enter warmly into all the ways of thinking and acting
current in the place, and having a general notion of what
they are. Games are apt to loom unduly large, and for
many, learning from books appears to be comparatively
unimportant. To understand public life and affairs, to
have fixed standards of honour, to be more or less
familiar with the classics, are the expectations which all
must fulfil. But many of the boys do not expect to
need any branch of knowledge in earning a living,
though this is less true now than it formerly was when
the number of public schools and the attendance at them
were much more restricted. This indirect incentive to
intellectual work has, then, less force than in other
schools, especially as it is not held in honour among the
boys. The strength of the intellectual incentives felt
are, therefore, more entirely a matter of individual
temperament and ability responding to the stimulus of
a master's personality. That is to say, they are more
largely found in the attraction of the subjects themselves
and the way they are taught, and in the feeling of grow-
ing power and appreciation, than in that of the use which
can be made of them in after life.

The really forcible argument for studying the classics
was that they were the best introduction to " the great
science of the nature of civilized man " ^ as Thomas
Arnold put it. That there is truth in this cannot be
seriously denied, but it is true only for those who so
^ Essay on Use of the Classics.

WHAT ARE THE MEANS? 165

master the languages that they can read the literature
with appreciation. That many of the best boys in the
great schools, and some in those of a lower rank — often,
finding incentive in the hope of winning a scholarship
at one of the universities — have done this does not
remove from the schools of many past centuries the
reproof that the majority of the boys who were offered
this mental pabulum found in it no stimulus of the
mental appetite, worked only under compulsion, and
never attained either the power of reading a Latin or
Greek book or the desire so to occupy their leisure.
Moreover, as the world's interests became more and
more engaged in modern thought and speculation,
modern events, and modern discoveries, so less and less
did the records of ancient life and thought seem worth
the trouble of mastering difficult unknown tongues
which would be of use for no other purpose. The
classics have thus inevitably become more and more
unsuited to be the staple intellectual food offered to boys
of the middle and upper classes. Their cultural office
as stated by Arnold is more perfectly fulfilled by modern
books, reflecting the real intellectual life of the present.
So, for a variety of reasons they appeal to an ever-
diminishing number both of boys and of home circles
as especially worth learning. A knowledge of the litera-
tures of Greece and Rome is less and less regarded as an
essential part of " the education of a gentleman," and
so the inciting force of such public opinion is decreas-
ingly operative.

To acknowledge this is not to fail m appreciation of
the classical literatures, especially that of Greece. It
must ever remain true that Hellenic thought is the seed
of modern intellectual life, and that any thorough

i66 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

insight into the latter demands a knowledge of the
former. Nor can it be questioned that an adequate
knowledge of the languages is necessary to a full
appreciation of the ancient thought. Some boys will
always by temperament and capacity feel the attraction,
and to them a course of classical study will be really
educative. But the majority of boys and men have
no great natural appreciation of linguistic niceties or
beauties, and to them the general thought embodied in
books is of more interest, and of greater inspiring power,
than the subtler shades of meaning. So, as ideas are of
greater moment than words, and the essence of a liberal
culture is the thought it embodies and the outlook it
helps to give, the ordinary boy would get a better insight
into the life and thought of Greece and Rome by reading
good translations of the classics than by spending much
valuable time in beginning to learn languages which he
can never master sufficiently well to do more than make
a bald, halting, incorrect, and utterly inadequate, trans-
lation himself, with much resort to a dictionary inter-
rupting the flow of thought.

After all, a language is essentially a medium for
conveying thought, so that from the point of view of
general culture all linguistic acquirement is simply
instrumental. Unless, then, a language can be learnt
to the stage at which it becomes a medium for thought,
it is nothing but waste of time to study it at all. The
plea that in learning Latin or Greek a boy obtains a
valuable discipline in application to what is at once hard
and intrinsically unattractive is based on a theory of
empty mental training which is generally rejected as
inconsistent with experience. There can be no incentive
to interested eflbrt when the pupil knows well that the

WHAT ARE THE MEANS? 167

school never takes a scholar far enough to enable him
to speak, understand, and read — in a word, to use — the
language for himself. He asks, ' What is the use of it ? •
and no answer which satisfies him can be given. From
the first he suspects its value, and he often finds that
this suspicion is regarded as a certamty by those at home.
Neither family tradition, nor family expectation, nor
prospect of joy in the studies themselves, supports him.
These considerations apply to the study in school of
Latin and Greek more than to that of modern foreign
languages. It is easy for a boy to see that he may need
French or German or Italian or Spanish for use or for
delight, and even that it is probable that he will need
them in holidays abroad if at no other time, and to
desire that the school may begin to teach him what he
can perfect by himself after school days are over. But,
with the pupil who is not going through a university
course in which Latin or Greek is included the school
teaching will mark the term of his learning. He ' learns
for the school, not for life,' and few indeed there are
who consider this worth doing, especially when they
know that at the best it can only be half done. While
Latin was the common language of the thought of
cultured Europe it was a diff^erent matter. Then all
desire to gain knowledge from books was a strong incen-
tive to learn Latin. But since the modern languages
have become necessary to one who wishes to know the
thought of other contemporary peoples, or to keep
abreast of the advance in any branch of knowledge,
this incentive to learn Latin has disappeared for most
children, who see in it nothing beyond its — to them—
not very attractive self. To persist in the classical
tradition of schools would be to throw away a valuable

1 68 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

incentive which can easily be transferred to the learning
of modern languages.

Thus it seems probable, as well as desirable, that it
will be increasingly accepted as wise to make the classical
languages the specialized work of pupils who are
particularly attracted by linguistic studies, and with the
majority to supply their place — especially in middle class
schools — by modern languages. For, as the necessity
of being able to read several modern European languages
if one would keep in touch with the advance of know-
ledge and thought becomes more recognized by the
leisured and cultured classes, and their commercial value
more evident to the middle classes, the demand for the
teaching of those languages in the schools to which their
children are sent will become more imperative. Such
a demand can only be adequately met by devoting the
time given to the ancient languages to the modern, for
it is evident that an attempt to teach four or five
languages concurrently is bound to lead to very little
mastery of any, and at the same time to make such
serious inroads on the time available that more effort is
given to acquiring the elementary use of the instruments
of thought than to the study of thoughts themselves ;
in short, to make school learning preponderatingly
verbal : and this is antagonistic to the very idea of
culture.

The temptation to verbalism is always present in
school, and it is naturally most potent in foreign
languages. The power to speak the language and to
understand it when spoken is essential to its being a real
language to the learner. But unless the instruction take
the pupil into the literature which enshrines the thoughts
and aspirations of the foreign people but little educative

WHAT ARE THE MEANS ? 1 69

result can be produced on his soul. His mind is not
widened by being placed at an unaccustomed point of
view, nor his sympathies extended by an insight into
the spiritual lives of nations with modes of thought and
feeling different from those of his own countrymen.
This takes time, and to succeed in several languages
demands a nice adjustment of concentration of effort,
always bearing in mind that the treasures of thought
and knowledge in English books, and the wealth of
interest in the world around, cannot be neglected without
educational ineffectiveness.

Concurrently with the decreasing incentive of the
classics came an increase in that offered by organized
games. With growing facilities for communication
they became more important, attracted more publicity,
and conferred ever greater renown on the heroes who
shone in them. So in the great boarding schools grew
up a tradition that muscle is more than mind — a trend
of evaluation quite in harmony with the increasingly
materialistic mode of thought which marked the nine-
teenth century. However, that great schoolmaster
Edward Thring found that boys whose intellectual life
classics quite failed to stimulate drew incentive from
various forms of practical work, and Arnold himself
had held that classics were badly taught unless they were
" made to bear on the things around us." ^ So the
situation was potentially saved. The growth in popu-
larity of modern sides in public schools — at first scorned
as refuges for the intellectually destitute — and of modern
Honours schools in the universities, testify to the fact
that people are more and more feeling that modern
thought and modern life are of surpassing importance

1 Op. cit.

lyo WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

and interest, and that time cannot be given by most for
an adequate mastery of languages which, even when
mastered, are keys to literatures which, after all, serve
only as a somewhat remote introduction to the study of
the problems of our own day. Men's outlook is less
backwards than it used to be, and their respect for the
wisdom of the ancients is smaller ; and, of course,
children who grow up in this intellectual atmosphere are
influenced by it, and generally find their intellectual
desires excited most by what throws a direct light on
present-day interests. The task before the public schools,
as before every other type of English school, is to bring
their work and their ideals into close touch with the real
problems and interests of contemporary life. The trend
of modern thought is evident, but what needs to be more
clearly and generally recognized is the effect it has on
the direction in which the young student of to-day will
most generally find a call to which he easily responds,
and that without such a result teaching will be less
efficacious than it should be in arousing the desire, and
giving the power, to learn.

The problem of what should be taught in school to
girls is one which the present rapid changes of opinion
as to woman's sphere in the world renders especially
difficult of solution ; particularly with respect to girls of
the middle classes. There is an increasing tendency for
girls to be prepared to enter various forms of profes- \
sional and commercial life. This involves a strenuous
intellectual application during the years of adolescence,
which the generally considerable industry of girls renders
particularly trying. Thus there is need for great care
that the bodily health, and especially the nervous equili-
brium, be not injured. There is, too, the danger that

WHAT ARE THE MEANS? 171

the old and beautiful ideal of womanliness may suffer
in the rough and tumble of competition with boys, with
their coarser fibre and greater inertia in all that relates
to mental work.

That the real profession of the majority of women
will be in the future, as it has been in the past, to be
competent mistresses of households and wise mothers of
children may be taken for granted. But there is a
minority not to be neglected who must expend their
energies in other ways. Were it possible to separate
the one class from the other in girlhood the task of
preparing for each walk of life would be no more arduous
than in the case of boys. As this is impossible the
problem which a girls' school has to face is how far the
needs of the one class should be subordinated to those
of the other. The opinion seems to be somewhat widely
held that at present higher schools for girls are too much
oriented towards professional life. This is to sacrifice
the majority, which from a national point of view is by
far the more important, to the more individualistic needs
of the minority. This would be a national misfortune.
A broad preparation for the needs of the home is not
only compatible with intellectual and aesthetic culture,
but demands it. Towards this the work of the school
should be addressed, and the more specialized and
strenuous study needed for professional training should
be left to be pursued in higher and specialized colleges
by those who are then definitely looking forward to
entering on some form of professional life. That in the
lower schools much emphasis should be laid on prepara-
tion for efficient housewifery is a direct consequence of
the position that all schooling should help to fit for
actual life.

J 72 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

A condition without which no subject of study in any
school can be a means of education is that it appeals with
greater or less strength as an incentive, and that it may
do so it must have some not too remote relation with
the interests which are taken up into the child's being
as he lives in his social circle. Individual temperament
and the distinctive family outlook will together deter-
mine relative strength of interest aroused. But if a
pupil is left utterly unresponsive nothing from that study
really enters his life. He may remember verbal state-
ments for a time, but his feelings and desires are left cold,
his opinions and judgements are not affected.

This, however, does not render absurd the idea of a
common course of study for whole classes of pupils.
Young children have but embryonic tendencies and
interests, and a sympathetic teacher can excite most of
them to some temporary enthusiasm for almost any
subject with which he is himself in sympathy. So the
beginnings are made of many possible lines of strong
incentive. The home attitude, the boy's temperament
and the outlook it makes the most natural for him to
take, and the continued stimulating or depressing power
of the teaching, are the great determinants of the
strength these growing dynamic forces of life will
acquire, and of the relation they will hold to each other.
But the outlook of a true education must be as wide as
life, so that the course of study in every school should
be sufficiently full not only to give choice of more
specialized interests for the elder pupils but to vivify
and strengthen general interests in all the main typesj
of human life and activity.

The questions when specialization should begin anc
to what extent it should be carried admit of no general]

WHAT ARE THE MEANS? 173

answer. Everything depends upon the place in life the
pupil is preparing to occupy. No matter what may be
a person's work he needs a vast amount of knowledge
and insight outside its range. But in some cases this
is mainly knowledge which can be gained only by the
experience of living among men ; in others, in addition
to this is demanded much knowledge which can only be
acquired by the study of books or by some other directed
kind of mental work. The law of the barrister, for
example, would be of little use to him unless it were
supported by a considerable amount of knowledge of
things outside law. Moreover, the standard of culture
of the grade of society in which the pupils are likely to
move should be a determining factor in deciding how
much general study should be considered educationally
necessary before, or by the side of, specialized study.
The higher the social rank to which the doer of the
specialized work is held to belong, and the less
mechanical that work is in itself, the greater the number
of relations needed between it and the whole intellectual
equipment, and so the fuller that equipment must be.
To grant, then, that some specialization may be good in
the upper forms of middle class schools whose pupils
leave at about sixteen years of age does not commit one
to the position that a pupil who is preparing to continue
his studies for another six or seven years, and to under-
take a university course, should begin specializing at
at an equally early age. It must be assumed that such
an extension of the preparation for life is related to a
hi2:her form of specialized work, and one, therefore,
which is wholly effective only when it is related to a
wide range of more or less directly cognate knowledge.
Moreover, it is implied that the social position which

174 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

this higher work will give will entail wide duties, and
give openings for numerous activities, for which many-
sided intellectual, social, and aesthetic, interests are
essential.

Thus, the higher the specialization the wider and
deeper the general culture in which it should be em-
bedded, so that the higher the institutions in which the
learning is acquired the later the age at which the
specialization should begin. Premature specialization
is one of the greatest intellectual evils of our time, but
what is premature in one case is legitimate in another.
To draw a general rule from its legitimacy in the latter
class of cases is to assume implicitly that all specialized
work is on the same intellectual level, an assumption
which has only to be laid bare to be rejected. Again it
must be insisted that the solution of the scholastic
problem is to be found only in a whole-hearted and
intelligent attempt to relate it to the problems of the
actual life of the young people concerned. An abstract
scholastic theory which decides these matters simply from
scholastic considerations deserves the contempt with
which the general public is apt to regard it.

But though rejected when set forth explicitly as
theory, the rule of premature specialization is accepted
in practice when embodied in a system of examinations
which has the specious appearance of discovering and
cherishing special talent. The honours of the univer-
sities are open to specialists, and the preparation to win
them begins in the schools eight or ten years earlier.
Such premature over-emphasis on one branch of learning
would be impossible did the universities require adequate
evidence of general intellectual culture before their own
specialized work was begun. Schools which prepare

WHAT ARE THE MEANS? 175

their pupils for a university course would then not have
the temptation, which is now overwhelmingly strong, to
narrow the intellectual outlook of their ablest pupils in
order to secure for them the honour and pecuniary
reward of a scholarship, and for themselves the reputation
of successful human training-stables. If the universities
cannot succeed in securing sufficient depth and width of
intellectual life as a condition of entrance they should
insist on adequate time being given to it during the
university course itself, before its own specialized studies
are entered upon. The older university theory that the
general course in the Faculty of Arts should be, in all
cases, preliminary to the specialized higher faculties was
essentially sound, though, of course, it would now find
expression in studies different from those of the Middle
Ages.

The insistence on an extent of general culture pro-
portioned to the time spent in the scholastic preparation
for life would not necessarily imply that throughout the
general course equal emphasis should be placed upon
every kind of intellectual interest, but only that none
should be allowed to fall out altogether, or to recede
into the remote background.

The dominance of examinations in English schools
and universities has some virtues and many vices, when
regarded as a means of education. To enable a school
to judge whether it is doing its work of teaching as well
as other schools of similar grade and in similar circum-
stances is helpful : on the other hand, implicitly to pit
school against school, often when the circumstances are
by no means similar, is wholly bad. An examination
imposed or conducted by an outside authority, or
accepted from an external examining board, may give

176 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

needed guidance to some schools as to what it is generally
considered desirable to teach : on the other hand, it limits
freedom, fails adequately to meet special needs, and
imposes what the examiners think desirable in the way
of learning. Such considerations apply to examinations
common to many schools, no matter how they are con-
ducted. It seems plain that their educative value to a
school is in inverse proportion to the competence of its
teaching staff.

Such objections do not lie against internal tests of
progress based on the actual work done in the school.
Then the examination follows the teaching, no matter
whether it is conducted by the staff alone or in con-
junction with an external examiner. English schools
and universities, however, have unfortunately inherited
a tradition as to how the results of their work should be
tested, which in its general application seems to us
vicious in essence as based on a false conception of know-
ledge, and disastrous in its reflex influence on the aims
set before themselves in study by the students. So long
as school and university studies were linguistic and, to
a less degree, mathematical, doubtless a system of
examination by papers to be written in a limited time
was a test of power to use the language or to solve
mathematical problems. But to apply this method to
subjects of quite other types is to test the wrong things
in the wrong way. A system of examination by papers,
to be written in a limited time and under conditions
under which no real intellectual work is ever done, can
be no true test of either the mental power developed or
of the trends of interest cultivated. The tendency of
all such tests is to emphasize memory of words and
encourage the temporary storage of statements of facts.

WHAT ARE THE MEANS? 177

If problems are set they must be such simple ones as
can be solved in the very short time available for each,
and without access to sources and authorities to which
every student would appeal at any other time ; and so,
again, the power tested is little more than that most
elementary and least valuable form of memory — the
recall of isolated pieces of information.

The power which is tested is the power the student
finds it pays him best to cultivate. So the aim of
students at school and university is too often just to
* learn ' enough to answer the questions, and for many the
examination becomes, as Guyau put it " nothing but
permission to forget." ^ Were tests of trends of interest
and of realized power devised, the laborious accumula-
tion of facts would no longer be the object of ambition,
and this it is which overweights school and university
study. The boy or girl at school, the undergraduate at
the university, all have interests outside their studies,
no m.atter how numerous and varied the latter may be.
They do not relieve over-pressure by dropping all such
outside interests, though some may be held in temporary
abeyance. For those interests are real, because they
grow out of the intellectual life. Until the studies of
schools and universities are equally real interests, those
institutions will be but imperfect places of education.
When they are, there will no more be over-pressure in the
one case than in the other. But such a truly educative state
of things will only be possible when the tests of progress
are found in the normal course of work and are cognate
to that work in its best and most profitable form.

No doubt, in the view of knowledge they commonly
assume examinations do but reflect the current evil

'^Education and Heredity, trans, by Greenstreet, p. 172.

M

1 78 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

superstition that to be able to talk is to know. It is
just the dominance of this error which makes school
work so often worthless, even when not positively
mischievous, as a means of education. From it springs
the prevalence of the bad teaching which calls forth no
intellectual life, but stifles any nascent aspiration to know
under a wearisome dogmatic reiteration of statements
of little intrinsic worth. The contrast between the
attitude of children in general towards their lessons and
towards their other pursuits is a sufficient condemnation
of the former. Till schools free themselves from the
false notion that learning is naturally repugnant to youth
they will never do much of that true teaching which
consists in stimulating others to learn. And till school
teaching is enlightened by careful meditation on the
conditions of its success it cannot be really educative.

True teaching develops power ; true examining would
be a testing of that power — the power to use knowledge,
not to exhibit a simulacrum of it. True teaching is the
suggestion of problems and enquiries, and the giving
of any guidance necessary for their resolution ; true
examining would test this power of independent quest.
Nor would it impose conditions alien from those under
which the actual intellectual work of life is done. An
intelligent worker in real life uses such aids as libraries
and museums, and takes an adequate time in which to
solve his problems and find an answer to his questions.
He does not try to fill his memory with minute details :
it is sufficient for him to know where to lay his hand on
them when he needs them. This power of knowing
where to find the tools with which intellectual work is
done, and how to use them, is of first-rate importance
in true work : the current examination not only ignores

WHAT ARE THE MEANS? 179

it but stigmatizes it by implication as an unworthy
substitute for the labour of memorizing. In short, it
inculcates wrong methods of work as well as wrong
ideals of work.

An examination should be a test of the power to do
such real intellectual work as is adapted to the age and
intellectual development of the person examined, and
should, therefore, propose suitable problems for solution
under conditions normal for that person, and in what is
for him an adequate time. With a variety and choice
of problems, trend of interest would be discovered, and
the result would show the kind of mental power pos-
sessed. In such solutions that reproduction of the
thoughts and statements of others which now is most
highly esteemed would sink into the very low place which
its character deserves. The present system, even when
most intelligently worked, tends to give greatest glory
to superficial quickness, for no problem can be set which
demands long-continued earnest thought, judicial weigh-
ing of evidence, testing of conclusions — in short, any-
thing of high intellectual worth. Verbal memory and
shallow cleverness are the surest aids to success. No
wonder that the prodigies of the examination room often
sink in after life into a profound obscurity of medio-
crity.

Teaching, then, is educative as far as it is stimulating.
And in this the personality of the teacher counts for
more than the method of teaching. Especially is this
the case with young pupils, for whose benefit detailed
and stereotyped methods of teaching are so often put
forth. Good teaching is methodical in the sense that it
deals with definite topics in such a way that confusion
of thought, waste of time, and disappointment of

i8o WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

expectation, are avoided. It secures that the learner
knows what he is to try to learn because it ensures that
he wants to learn it ; and it presents the material of his
investigations in a well-ordered way, so that the unim-
portant does not obscure the essential, and the facts may
be in evidence less for their own sakes than for the
sake of the relations they embody. Good teaching is
impossible without careful preliminary consideration on
the part of the teacher of what shall be considered, how
it shall be dealt with, and in what general order the parts
shall be taken up. But what is done in detail is deter-
mined at the moment by the interaction between the
minds of the scholars, and between those minds and that
of the teacher. Nothing is more disastrous to teaching
as an instrument of education than implicit faith in a
form of method. That method is best which evokes
most fruitful effort. That is the teaching which gives
power to do, and, therefore, increases freedom. Such
teaching avoids both the error of the theory that a child
should be left to make his own intellectual discoveries
unprompted and ostensibly unguided, and that of the
tradition that he should believe and do exactly what he
is told, and no more. The union of these is the practical
expression in the sphere of intellectual activity of the
synthesis between freedom and authority. The teacher's
art is so to set problems and pose questions that the pupil
wants to solve and answer them ; in a word, that
he seeks, but must be prepared to accept what he
finds. So only can he rise to a conception of natural
law.

It is not only in the world of things but also in the
realm of thought that he must be led to seek, and to
accept what he finds. In later life he may come to

WHAT ARE THE MEANS?

i«i

question the generally received laws of nature or of
human life ; in youth he is only preparing himself to be
a critic by learning what evidence means, and in what
its cogency consists. It is absurd to suppose that in a
few short years a child can learn what it has taken the
human race thousands of years to attain ; it is an
educational sin to lead him to imagine that he has
done so. This fundamental error underlies Rousseau's
suggestion of prepared experiences in which the artificial
arrangement is carefully hidden. In all helping of
children to make * discoveries ' no attempt should be
made to conceal the fact that help is given, though it
need not be ostentatiously paraded. Especially is such
help apparent when the young learner is finding his way
into the world of thought. There he soon gets lost and
discouraged unless he has continual encouragement and
assistance. "How can we expect the child by an
entirely spontaneous evolution to find for himself the
thoughts which have become a human and national
inheritance ? " ^ asks Fouillee, and evidently no answer
is possible but that it is utterly irrational to expect any-
thing of the kind.

Yet the teaching is not educative if the thoughts be
passively received and stored up in the memory to be
reproduced on demand. They must be taken into the
active thinking life of the reader. As Newman wrote :
"A man may hear a thousand lectures, and read a
thousand volumes, and be at the end of the process very
much where he was, as regards knowledge. Something
more than merely admitting it in a negative way into the
mind is necessary, if it is to remain there. It must not
be passively received, but actually and actively entered

^ Education from a National Standpoint : trans, by Greenstreet, p. loi.

1 82 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

into, embraced, mastered. The mind must go half-way
to meet what comes to it from without." ^

To enter into the thoughts of another is, however, to
impose constraint on the intellectual life, even as we have
seen that all the thoughts and opinions with which we
are surrounded from our youth up help to shape our
views and estimates. Mr. Lecky approached perilously
near to nonsense when he wrote : " If our private judge-
ment is the sole rule by which we should form our
opinions, it is obviously the duty of the educator to
render that judgement as powerful, and at the same time
to preserve it as unbiassed, as possible. To impose an
elaborate system of prejudices on the yet undeveloped
mind, and to entwine those prejudices with all the most
hallowed associations of childhood, is most certainly
contrary to the spirit of the doctrine of private judge-
ment." ^ He apparently assumed that the "unde-
veloped mind" is void of knowledge and of thoughts,
and to this sufficiently startling assumption he added
that of the possibility of excluding the influences of the
intellectual atmosphere in which that mind lives and
grows. How can a mind grow except by thinking, and
whence can it get the material to think about, or example
to imitate in learning to think, but from those around
it .^ It is the old false hypothesis of essential independ-
ence between a mind and its environment. We grant
at once that these assumptions are necessary to the
position that " our private judgement is the sole rule by
which we should form our opinions." That they are
impossible to realize is but further evidence of our main
thesis of the inevitable and unceasing reaction between

^ Idea of a University, p. 489.

2 TAe Rise and Influence of Rationalism, ch. 2.

WHAT ARE THE MEANS? 183

life and surroundings, and that in this reaction freedom
is attained through a right acceptance of constraint.

To form the unformed spirit so that it sees and accepts
what is good and true is the aim of education, and by
that aim all suggested means must be judged. Do they
form the mind, and if so, how.'' Do they so form it
that it strenuously seeks its ends ^ Are those ends good
and true.^ In what way will such and such a piece of
educative effort make towards the desired result ? Such
are the questions which should be continually in the mind
of the educator, and by which he should test all that is
offered for his acceptance. Our analysis has led us to
see that no means are effective which do not keep close
to real life — for, indeed, in so far as they depart from it
they are untrue. The liability to get divorced from life
and to work in an artificial world is a constant danger
in school, and especially is its work of teaching apt to
stray from real needs and interests and to be affected by
fanciful abstract theories. Thus, teaching needs to be
checked continually by the test of whether it is so related
to the actual lives of those who are taught, and so given,
that it leads them to press forward freely to relate them-
selves more fully to all that is good and noble and true
in their own human world. Teachers who consider the
actual lives of those whom they teach as a determining
condition of their work, and who keep the ennobling
of those lives always in view, are the only ones who are
really seeking an ideal : others are merely pursuing
shadows. For, we again repeat, an ideal is realizable by
those for whom it is an ideal.

CHAPTER V

WHO ARE THE AGENTS?

Every concrete individual life or experience is a con-
stant interaction between inner spiritual forces and the
environment in which they function. In such reaction
the trends of life — of interest, desire, purpose, thought
— are determined. There are, then, innumerable influ-
ences helping to mould the developing personality, and
these are strongest in early years, when trends of life
have not become stereotyped by habituation. Some of
these external influences are deliberately brought to bear,
and these are rightly called educative. Others, so far
as human intention is concerned, are casual, and yet their
cumulative force may make in one general direction and
may be very great. So, it must be recognized that,
however strenuous and systematic educative endeavours
may be, there is a considerable limitation in their power,
and, consequently, in the responsibility of education for
what the individual man or woman becomes.

Moreover, intentional efforts to influence are of all
degrees of definiteness, of intensity, and of duration.
Some are transient and almost accidental, such as advice
or warning given on the spur of the moment to a child
to whom one is a comparative stranger, and these are
of all degrees of seriousness in intention ; others are
continued through years with much consistency, such as

WHO ARE THE AGENTS? 185

those brought to bear on moral conduct by a good home,
or on intellectual life by a good school. Some may be
congruent forces making for the same general end, but
directed by different persons or societies ; others may
be more or less directly opposed, and so tend to neutralize
each other.

It would be an unprofitable task to attempt to
enumerate all the incentives intentionally set before any
one child or youth by all the various people with whom
he is brought into contact, and to estimate their power.
They can only be considered more or less in the mass,
and the individual influences gathered up into that of
typical groups. So, a discussion of the relative functions
of the chief educative agents must concern itself with
the forms of cumulative influence exerted by the various
communities in which a child lives. Some are obvious
because they are organized, and it would much simplify
the task could our attention be limited to those. But that
would be to neglect the fact that some of the strongest
form.ative influences felt by the young are those of
the unorganized community of the society in which they
live. Here the attitude to life, the rule of manners, the
standard of duty and of conduct, reflected in the family,
exercise a persistent moulding force. Nor is this wholly
— though it is partly — the passive pressure of a homo-
geneous environment. Many members of that society
bring intermittent, but quite intentional, influences to
bear on the children, as well as others which are at least
the outcome of the feeling that general adherence to the
accepted code ought to be secured. On the intellectual
side, too, a child learns much from the willingly given
inspiration, through example and precept, of those with
whom he daily associates. The direct educative influ-

1 86 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

ence of the local organized community is less direct.
It is felt by individual children mainly through the
schools, and to a much less extent through public services
— such as libraries, museums, and parks — maintained by
the municipality. That of the State is still more indirect
and vague in its individual incidence. We must, then,
seek the agents of a child's education in the social
relations in which he is placed, and only by a considera-
tion of them can we determine the extent and justifica-
tion of their respective functions.

The family is primordial. Of it the child becomes a
member by birth, and of necessity he is related to all
who belong to it in a much closer and more direct way
than to any other persons. From its very nature the
family is the first educator of the child. For it is not
a mere sum of independent units — it is a whole, held
together by relations inherent in human nature itself.
Every member is, through ties of blood, in definite
intrinsic relations to every other member. The parents
are the centre and explanation of the whole, the first
embodiment of love, of protection, and of law. All the
children are bound together through the parents, and
all share the same instinctive feelings towards them —
feelings which become strengthened and particularized
by habit and constant intercourse. Such a naturally
organized community has a life of its own, in which
each member participates to his degree, and with which
his personal life is in close relation. For each child
derives his life from the family ancestry, and from the
moment of birth is surrounded by family feeling and
thought. Often there is a strong family tradition into
which he enters as into a heritage, and which he absorbs
unconsciously in early years, and accepts consciously in

WHO ARE THE AGENTS? 187

later years, as his own. So his life is an expression of
the family life.

Further, the life of the family is rational and moral,
and this implies that the family has corporate aims and
ideals, with which the individual aims and ideals of its
members are in a congruent relation. So far as this is
not the case, the unity of the family is shattered. The
family must seek to realize its ideal or lose its corporate
life ; that is, cease to exist as a family. But this
endeavour involves in its very essence the training of
its younger members. For this task its very smallness
specially fits it. In early years constant and intensive
educative influences are more potent than occasional
though extensive influences. Sympathy and love — the
very seeds of morality — spring up instinctively towards
those who are related by blood, and are fostered in the
narrow circle of family life with its common aims,
common hopes, common fears, and constant, familiar,
and affectionate, intercourse. To every member of the
little community the budding nature of the child is a
matter of deep and tender interest. Surrounded by love
from the first — love concentrated, as it were, and so
brought within his power to reciprocate — the child
naturally and spontaneously learns to identify himself
with the interests of those whom he loves, and to desire
their happiness as his own ; indeed to find his own happi-
ness possible only when theirs is likewise secured. The
instinctive attraction due to ties of blood is the focus
from which wider human sympathies will radiate. So,
as Professor Mackenzie says, --The family is like a
burning-glass which concentrates human sympathies on
a point " ^ The child enters with ever-increasing con-

^ Introduction to Social Philosophy, p. 363.

1 88 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

sclous intelligence and willingness into its corporate life,
and slowly but surely finds his place in it. At first it is
a mere appanage of himself, existing to do his will and
satisfy his wants. Its loving discipline leads him on to
recognize that there is a converse truth — that he exists
to satisfy its desires and to do its will. So the conception
of the constant correlation of rights and obligations
grows up within him ; and that, too, is ready to expand
the width of its reference as circumstances call for such
enlargement.

The concentrated and familiar intercourse of family
life is also the best medium for the development of early
intelligence. No one can obtain such an intimate in-
sight into a child's nature as a mother, made observant
by maternal love. She learns to know his strong and
weak points, his temper and disposition, his mental
peculiarities of every kind, as well as his physical perfec-
tions and shortcomings. And the amount of study and
thought which the smallness of the family makes it
possible to lavish on each individual child is a very
important factor in the development of its mental powers.
When other family duties limit seriously the amount of
the maternal care and attention there is a great and
lamentable loss of early education, though in present
conditions it is often unavoidable, as in many working-
class homes. When the limitation is due to the attrac-
tions of a frivolous life it is equally unfortunate, but is
then blameworthy in exact proportion as it is avoidable.

In a good family, then, the individuality of the child
finds scope. He lives the family life, yet his own life is
not absorbed in it. It is not a cast-iron mould which
shapes the lives of its members, but a free activity,
receiving individual and separate expression in the life

WHO ARE THE AGENTS? 189

of each. It is the mark of good family education that
the individuality of the children is at once respected and
lovingly directed. Each child is regarded as an end in
himself — a being to be improved — and not simply as a
means to increase the satisfaction of others. It may be
noted that, from this educative point of view, the family
is limited to those who live under one roof. Other
relatives take more or less prominent places in the wider
social circle, but do not contribute to the family influence.

Of all other societies the child in his early years is a
member only indirectly through the family. As he
grows older such membership becomes more direct and
personal. But at first the child is a citizen of the State,
and a member of the Church, because he is a part of a
family which is a collective unit of membership. The
educative functions of all such wider communities, there-
fore, increase with his age. At first they are absorbed
in the family influence ; then they become gradually
separated from it. Here comes in the danger that with
this inevitable separation may grow up antagonism, so
that the youth is impelled in opposite directions by the
educative influences brought to bear upon him by agents
with a legitimate right to guide and direct him.

In its early stages the educative influence of any wider
community is proportionate to its degree of accord with
the family point of view. Thus, the child finds himself
most at home in the social grade whose attitude towards
things in general the family accepts and expresses. If
the father is a keen politician the awakening of interests
in the organized life of the local community and of the
State is earlier and more effective than when the home
circle cares little for such matters. If the parents are
devout members of any religious body the child soon

I90 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

feels the educative influence of that organized society.
In all such cases the influence is felt through the family,
and is powerful in proportion as it is in harmony with that
of the general family tone. In a word, the family gives
the first set to the child's interests, the first channels for
his sympathies, the first trend of his opinions, the first
indication of what he should desire and seek. And this
shaping influence, working silently but constantly in the
whole tone of the family life, and asserting itself with
emphasis whenever there seems a danger that it may be
disregarded, is at work all the time the child remains at
home. Of necessity, it is the greatest of the agents that
form him. It tinges the whole of his spiritual life with
an indelible dye, and from the general tone of feeling it
induces there is no possibility of complete escape.
Doubtless, as the child advances in age he lives less and
less exclusively in this centre of his social life. He finds
himself accepted as a member of wider and wider circles,
he is influenced by them in all kinds of ways, and in all
degrees of intensity. But still at the heart of it all is the
family life.

The primary educative work of the family is this
general moulding of the whole spiritual life — its outlook,
its moral standards, its sentiments, its modes of thought,
its unexamined opinions or prejudices. It acts continu-
ously through the ideas, aims, and estimates, which are
taken for granted in all the family intercourse ; and
intermittently in direct instruction, either given posi-
tively through exhortation, advice, direction, or explana-
tion, or negatively through prohibition, condemnation,
and punishment. It is the atmosphere in which the
child lives and acts. Nor is this training only a moral
one : it is intellectual and practical as well. The mental

WHO ARE THE AGENTS? 191

attitude towards all the chief" relations of life, as well as
towards those which are technically called moral, is being
decided. And, of course, in family life and service every
child learns to do many things and to use many things.
Indispensable as is this more or less sporadic and
informal instruction, it is yet inadequate to meet the
requirements of life ; hence, from the family itself arises
the need for the school, whose more systematic intellec-
tual training may supplement that of the home.

The efficiency of family education is shown by such
considerations to be a matter of the first importance to
the well-being of the nation. On it, more than on
anything else, depends both the character and the
physical health and strength of future generations. If
it is bad, or even ineffective, no excellence of schools can
compensate for it. The school has then a warped and
distorted nature to work upon, and may be unable to do
more than check some of the evil tendencies and modify
the jaundiced outlook.

Now, a family educates well or ill according to its
outlook on life, and this is a matter both of ideal and of
culture. As has been already urged, the latter is less
essentially a matter of intellectual acquirement than of
the qualities of soul that intellectual work has developed.
Tolerance and charity, sympathy and beneficence, respon-
siveness to what is noble and beautiful, are the chief
marks of culture, whether they be found in what are
commonly called ' the cultivated classes ' or in the ranks
of * the common people.' Thus looked at, culture and
ideal are not separable. If the ideal is a narrow one^^as
that the one end of endeavour worth consideration is the
amassing of wealth or a rising in the conventional social
scale — its pursuit is incompatible with growth in real

192 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

culture. A low, selfish, and sordid or trivial, aim means
the degradation of the spiritual life. There is no corre-
lation between nobility of aim and width of outlook on
the one side, and wealth or conventional social status on
the other. In every class of the community are families
whose life is formed round a noble conception, and others
whose spiritual attitude is sordid and mean.

If goodness of human education depends on the
conscious apprehension of a worthy ideal it follows that
wherever such an ideal is absent good education is
lacking. There are, probably, some families — as, for
instance, those of habitual criminals — in which the ideal
is utterly bad, and the children are trained in wickedness ;
there are many in which the aim is low, narrow, and
material ; but there are yet others which fail as educa-
tional environments because they have no conscious ideal
at all — no seriousness in facing life. The parents drift
through the years with superficial thoughts and feelings,
devoid of fixed principles and rules, the playthings of
changing circumstances. They seek nothing definite,
but avoid as far as they can all trouble and annoyance.
They have but a feeble sense of responsibility, for they
never think earnestly on the outcome of their actions.
They are the most ineffective of educators ; for in their
dealings with their children they follow the same rule of
expediency — to take the line of least resistance — as in
other matters. It is evident that anything which
weakens the recognition by parents of their responsibility
for their children's training tends to cultivate in them
this attitude of mind, and that everything which takes
the direction of it out of their hands limits their responsi-
bility, for no one can be responsible for that which is
beyond his control.

WHO ARE THE AGENTS? 193

As has been said, as the child grows older other com-
munities wider than the family have their claims upon
him as he advances towards the relative independence of
manhood. Moreover, the family is only the starting-
point of social organization. Its life is just as truly a
reaction with the wider lives of the communities of which
it is a part as is that of the individual with his personal
environment. With some of these communities its
relations are inevitable ; with others they are optional.
Thus, the relation of the family, both with the State as
a whole and with the local governmental organization,
is inherent. It Is true that a family may emigrate from
one country to another, but nowhere in the civilized
world can it escape from membership of some State, with
correlative rights and obligations. The sense of this
membership is less intimate in the large States of to-day
than it was in the small city States which Plato and
Aristotle regarded as alone capable of fulfilling all the
requirements of a political organism. But it is not
absent, and it attaches itself with pride to the past glories
and present power of the native land. To some extent
a more personal relation is felt with the local unit of
organization — city, borough, or county — though this is
more marked in small towns and rural districts than in
populous industrial areas with a frequently shifting
population. Still, the interests of the local community
come home to the individual in many ways ; he knows
something of the men elected to carry on the local
government, and the matters they discuss affect his daily
life. Here, too, the relation is a necessary one ; for
though a family may pass from one district to another it
only transfers its allegiance to another similar local
authority.

194 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

The child is thus born into a State as necessarily as he
is born into a family. But his recognition of that fact
is neither immediate nor spontaneous. It has to be
implanted and nourished. His membership of the class
to which his parents belong, and in which they pass their
lives, is much more quickly and unconsciously accepted
as a fact. It is through a suitable education that he must
be led to know that he has rights and obligations extend-
ing far beyond the narrow circle of his acquaintances.
That truth will become real to him in proportion as his
imagination is fired by the greatness and glory of his
native land in the past and in the present. The rights
and obligations are inherent in the position of a citizen
whether he recognize them or not, just as gravitation is
inherent in matter though every fall is a failure to give
knowledge of that truth due control over action.
Inherent social laws can no more be disregarded with
impunity than can inherent physical laws. It is, there-
fore, to the advantage both of the State and of the indi-
vidual child that the latter should be trained to live as
an efficient and worthy citizen. For this his life in the
home into which he was born is preparatory, as it leads
him to the first conception of reciprocal rights and
duties ; his life in his social circle extends this conception.
But if both home and social circle be opposed to many
of the corporate acts of the State the child will insensibly
receive a bent antagonistic to loyal citizenship.

From the mere fact of birth, then, a child enters into a
system of mutual rights and obligations with the State
into which he is born. He has in particular the right to
protection by the wider community against any social
injury that might be inflicted upon him, and the corre-
sponding obligation of submission to the regulations

WHO ARE THE AGENTS? 195

which that wider community may make for his social
guidance. Normally, the rights are received, and the
obligations fulfilled, mainly through the family ; but if
the family itself be in default it may become the duty of
the State to intervene between it and the child. Then
begins that disastrous conflict between legitimate educa-
tive agents of which we have spoken — a conflict which
the good of the child demands should be terminated,
even if it be by the abrogation of the family mfluence
altogether, as when he is sent from home to a reformatory
school.

The State could have no such rights were it merely an
aggregate of independent units held together by an
implicit ' social contract.' From this conception flows
that extreme individualism which limits the rights and
duties of Government to matters of external defence and
internal police, and assumes that enlightened self-interest
will so determine the conduct of every citizen that the
greatest possible well-being of the whole community will
be secured. There is something noble in this thought
of a universal rational pursuit of the good by every indi-
vidual ; but it is an ideal in the sense of a figment of the
imagination, not in the only serviceable sense of a
possible improvement to be attained. It ignores the
complex nature of man — his tendency to act on impulses
and instincts whose reference is narrowly selfish and
immediate, and whose leading is far from being uniformly
in the direction in which enlightened self-interest would
point. It ignores, too, the thorough-going dependence
of the individual on the community, which involves that
unless he seek the common ends as well as his private
ends he must fail to fulfil the obligations which his
citizenship imposes on him. Experience shows that,

196 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

however closely common and private ends would coin-
cide were both directed by perfect wisdom, in actual life
they often diverge, and may quite possibly conflict.

In opposition to extreme individualism stands the
theory which would absorb the man in the State, identify
private with public duty, and estimate personal worth
solely by the test of social efficiency. This is to regard
the individual as merely a means to the attainment of
the common end of the State — whether it be military as
in ancient Sparta, or commercial and industrial as would
be the tendency in our own times.

Neither man nor State, however, can be successfully
taken as a mere means towards the perfection of the
other, just because the existence of each is so implicated
in that of the other that the degradation of either — no
matter how motived — involves as an inevitable and rapid
consequence the degradation of the other. Man is by
nature both individual and social ; for, as rational, he
cannot but seek to understand the world of which he is
a part, and his relations to the realities around him. He
must find — or imagine — a system in things which satis-
fies his reason. But the material world is always more
or less foreign to the natural man, because the rationality
he seeks in it lies hidden beneath the surface. In inter-
course with his fellows he feels himself in contact with
rational minds like his own, and he can understand them
because he finds them swayed by like passions, desires,
and thoughts, as himself. So, in early stages he transfers
this comprehensible life as directly as he can to the world
of things, and imagines it everywhere peopled by intelli-
gent spirits, of greater power than his own but prompted
to action by like motives and impulses. His later
explanations are only deeper ways of finding more con-

WHO ARE THE AGENTS? 197

sistent rationality in it. In the world of men, therefore,
man finds his own nature : he is at home in it because
he is part of it, and he cannot in thought cut off his life
from its influences any more than from all relations to the
world of things.

But rational life is life in which means are intelligently
taken to attain an object, either clearly apprehended in
thought or vaguely felt as desirable, perhaps largely
through the promptings of instinct. However that may
be, the planning of means is an intellectual process which
involves adaptation of forces. With reference to a
common end the forces are the efforts of the various
members of the society. Hence, the conception of
obligation to work for the attainment of the purpose of
the community, so far as it is understood, is inherent in
the elementary fact that man is a rational being. Doubt-
less, the passions and selfish impulses of an individual
may lead him to do violence to this, as to any other,
demand of his reason. But then all sense of complete-
ness of life must be wanting.

The social community into which a man is born is,
then, not an accidental setting for his life. His social
relations are necessary and intrinsic, because only through
them can he realize many of the potentialities of his
being. In its widest reading this asserts the essential
brotherhood of all men. Through the narrower com-
munity of each nation the citizens are related to the rest
of humanity in a way analogous to that in which through
the family the child is related to the State. But for our
purposes we need not go so far afield. Despite the ever-
increasing bonds of communication and intercourse, the
growing community in knowledge, in ideals, and in
aspirations, between corresponding classes in all civilized

198 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

nations, the separate political organization into States
gives the units of administrative action. In every long-
organized State, bound together by community of race,
of aspirations, or of interests, there is a national life,
expressing a national ideal in some ways peculiar to itself.
The acceptance of this by the individual citizens is
patriotism, and to the extent to which patriotism inspires
a people the claims of the nation as a living whole are
acknowledged : to the degree to which private interests
and pleasures are sacrificed to its demands the national
good becomes a motive force in individual life. It is
evident that when patriotism loses its force a process of
national disintegration begins ; and unless its place be
supplied by the emergence into prominence of other
social bonds and obligations the national life is weakened
and tends to disappear : the individualism which has its
deepest root in man's physical nature begins to overcome
the social feelings which are the necessary conditions of
his higher spiritual life.

In the constant interaction between the individual and
the State each shapes the other. But the larger the State
the more indirect is its corporate influence on the citizen,
and the more indirect is his influence on it. In a society
as complex as that of any modern European nation there
are, it is true, all kinds of interactions of class with class,
but the relations of understanding and sympathy of each
individual are largely confined to members of his own
social grade, and often of his own economic pursuit.
His relations with members of other classes are fre-
quently limited to those of an economic nature, and are
too often accompanied by those feelings of opposition
and incipient distrust which so easily enter into bargain-
ing between people who conceive their interests to be

WHO ARE THE AGENTS? 199

antagonistic. Thus, the tendency of modern industrial
and commercial life towards increasing the magnitude of
enterprises, and so drawing together vast numbers of
working men whose sole interest in the industry is to
gain by it as good a livelihood as possible, is to separate
both the actual lives of the working classes and the ideals
which dominate them from those of their employers, who
frequently, as members of limited liability companies,
care only for profits. This is antagonistic to the continu-
ance of solidarity of corporate national feeling, and
renders it diifficult to secure the hearty co-operation of
every class in measures taken by the State for the common
good.

It is true that all classes have hitherto united in the
presence of a great national crisis, and there is no present
reason to fear for the future in that respect. But the
growth of the feeling of exclusive class solidarity may
easily involve a weakening of the feeling of national
unity, especially if the conviction spread that the wishes
and views of the great mass of the people — the working
classes — are practically ignored. Nothing comes out
more plainly in the working man's expression of his
thoughts and feelings in Seems So ! than the suspicion
that "he is treated like a child badly brought up by its
parents, a child very wronged and very naughty," ^ and
that by people whose intentions may be good, but whose
knowledge of the conditions they wish to improve is
defective. The action of the State in what relates to the
life of any of the various classes of its citizens can be
taken up into that life only if it be in accord with the
modes of thought and the conditions of existence of that
class. And unless it be taken up, so that the various

1 Ch. 20.

200 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

classes feel that their own interests are understood as well
as sought by the State in its corporate capacity, the recog-
nition of national obligation must decrease with the
growing conviction that class rights, either through
indifference or through ignorance, receive inadequate
recognition. In no matter is this more important than
in regulation by the State of the education of the chil-
dren, for unless such action be consonant, not only in
intention but in deed, with the aspirations of the parents,
it cannot fail to weaken at once the sense of corporate
unity and that of parental responsibility.

Most diverse views have been held as to the legitimate
range of State action in education. That the training of
the young is a matter of common interest has been gener-
ally recognized among civilized peoples. For centuries
this interest was expressed through the Church, in which
the whole nation on its spiritual side was organized.
As this unity became less and less the fact the claim of
the Church to be the great educational corporation was
more and more questioned. Then for one corporate
agent another was sought, and was naturally found in the
State. So La Chalotais claimed for the State " the
inalienable and imprescriptible right to instruct its
members," and nowhere has that right been asserted both
in theory and in practice more thoroughly than in France
since the Revolution. " The University, as it existed
during the First Empire, offers a striking example of
that mania for the control of the general will which
philosophers had so attractively taught and Napoleon so
profitably practised. It is the first definite outcome of
a desire to subject education and learning to wholesale
regimental methods, and to break up the old-world
bowers of culture by State-worked steam-ploughs

WHO ARE THE AGENTS? 201

The new University of France . . . was not a local uni-
versity : it was the sum total of all the public teaching
bodies of the French Empire arranged and drilled in one
vast instructional array. Elementary schools, secondary
schools, lyceeSy as well as the more advanced colleges, all
were absorbed in and controlled by this great teaching
corporation, which was to inculcate the precepts of the
Catholic religion, fidelity to the Emperor and his Govern-
ment, as guarantees for the welfare of the people and the
unity of France." ^ With some modification of detail
the same general conception of the relation of the State
to the training of the young prevails in France to-day.

Now, it was not evident that the functions which had
been universally attributed to the Church, so long as it
was recognized as the divinely appointed teacher of man-
kind, reverted to the State when the claim of the Church
was rejected. In our own country the adherents of the
individualistic school of thought were strenuous in their
opposition to any interference whatever of the State with
schools provided for the mass of the people. One of
the ablest expositions of the extreme view is contained in
a series of Letters written to Lord John Russell by
Mr. E. Baines in 1846. He bases his arguments on the
two main grounds of freedom of thought and parental
responsibility. He urges that the principle upon which
State Education is founded is " that it is the duty of the
Government to train the Mind of the People," and that
if this be accepted limitations of its scope are " purely
j^rbitrary, and adopted from motives of policy and expedi-
ency," and, further, that history and experience show this
to be the case. So, while he grants that " mental cultiva-
tion and good moral and religious principles in the people
^ Rose : Life of Napoleon I., ch. i 2.

202 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

are necessary to the public welfare," he denies the corol-
lary drawn by the advocates of State action " that Govern-
ment, being bound to care for the public welfare, is
consequently bound to give the cultivation and the prin-
ciples which are essential to it." ^ He foresees that " this
principle would obviously require a universal and com-
pulsory education, not only in general knowledge, but
also in religious and political opinions," ^ and in an earlier
letter he had already urged that " to compel the educa-
tion of the children in any particular set of schools is an
alarming interference with liberty." ^ In an eloquent
passage he writes: "Relieve men of their duties, and
you rob them of their virtues. It is the duty of parents
to provide education for their children, as they provide
them with food and clothing. It is the duty of the rich
to help the poor. It is the duty of every patriot and
every Christian, and especially of Christian communities,
to diffuse the light of religion and knowledge among the
ignorant and the depraved. These are the clear dictates
of Christianity and of reason. Leave Christianity and
reason to do their own work ; and they will do it in the
right way, that is, by working on the understandings and
hearts of men, not by coercion and compulsion, which
produce only an outward and mechanical obedience." *

Mr. Baines, then, opposed all direct action of the State
in the matter of schooling ; but he was willing that it
should aid the efforts of the religious bodies to provide
the needed schools. "The course hitherto pursued by
the Committee of Council on Education is, I conceive,

^ Letter 2. 2 /^/^^

^ TAe Social, Educational, and Religious State of the Manufacturing
Districts, p. 73.

^Letters to Lord J . Russell, 1846. Letter 5.

WHO ARE THE AGENTS? 203

right so far as it goes, though it ought to go further, and
to help the denominational schools of Dissenters as
well as the exclusive schools of the Church." ^ It will
be remembered that the grants of the Committee were
then divided between the definitely Anglican National
Society and the undenominational British and Foreign
School Society.

At the same time the legal claim of the Church of
England to exclusive recognition by the State was being
urged. Bishop Phillpotts of Exeter claimed that a
recent judgement of the Master of the Rolls showed that
" if a sum be given in trust for purposes of religion
generally, the law requires that it be employed for the
purposes of the Religion of the Church of England,"
and that the terms of the Grant for Public Education
must be construed to be for purposes of public education
on the principle thus enunciated ; that is to say — quot-
ing from the Judgement — "Religious Education form-
ing part of the plan, and that Religious Education being
according to the laws of the land." ^ So, in a letter to
Lord John Russell, the Bishop drew the conclusion that
while " the Church has no right to claim the enforcement
of any system of Education on the people, or any part of
the people, least of all on that part which does not belong
to the Church," nevertheless it " has a right to demand of
the State the means of offering Education to all, whether
they are members of the Church or not." On Lord John
Russell replying that the Government, while willing to
aid the Church to provide schools for its own children,
did not think it right to withhold aid from dissenters for
a like purpose, the Bishop affirmed that this statement

^ The Social, etc.. State of the Manufacturing Districts, p. 73.
'^Charge, 1839.

204 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

" gives me peculiar gratification, as it shows that no prac-
tical difficulties need any longer to exist in combining
due regard for the duties of the State to the Church, with
full security to the rights of conscience in those who dis-
sent from her doctrines, and do not join in her worship."
Practically, he would allow that no form or kind of
religious instruction or observance should be forced on
any child whose parents conscientiously objected to the
teaching of the National Church "in any school main-
tained wholly or partially by aid from the State." ^ Such
a concession of abstract legal rights to concrete facts
obviously did not meet the claim for absolute equality
put forward by writers like Mr. Baines. Indeed, the
Bishop had spoken of such a position as " a perfectly new
principle that the Church is one among the religious
denominations of the country, whose head is the Sove-
reign, and whose institutions are interwoven with those
of the temporal power." ^

Though the State persistently extended its control
over elementary schools it took no direct steps towards
providing them till 1870, and that was soon followed
by the enactment of compulsory attendance, and by
stringent negative regulation of the religious instruction
which could be given in schools provided by public
money, and its restriction to one definite period at the
beginning or end of the school day in all schools receiving
public aid. Thus the consequences which Mr. Baines
foresaw were, except in the matter of politics, soon
fulfilled.

Such a brief retrospect shows that in England the
action of the State, at any rate in its inception, was due to
compromise dictated by expediency, and not to the
^Charge, 1839. "-Ibid.

WHO ARE THE AGENTS? 205

acceptance of the general principle that to train the
citizens is the duty of the Government. That doctrine,
however, seems to be winning increased support, and the
Act of 1902 undoubtedly recognized a wider obligation
on the State than had hitherto been accepted. By it,
Local Authorities were given definite powers to provide
and support, with aid from the State, secondary as well as
elementary schools. Further, of recent years grants of
public money have been given to universities on condi-
tion of the acceptance of a certain amount of State
supervision.

An examination of the functions of the State in the
education of its children must start from the fact that the
recognition of the essential importance to the State of
the family, and through the family, the child, implies the
acceptance of obligations on the side of each. More-
over, the State has a direct interest in the character, intel-
ligence, and efficiency, of its citizens as a body. It is,
therefore, incumbent on it to secure that satisfactory
training is received by all its younger members. In
other words, a national system of education is demanded
by the very concept of the nation as an organized body
with purposes to be achieved and a life to be lived as a
community. A national system of education, however,
is not the same thing as a State system of schools, and
only through confusion of thought can they be identi-
fied. As education is a spiritual process, a national
system of education is in its essence a spiritual system.
In other words, it is a system of means by which all the
spiritual needs of the young in all classes of the com-
munity are adequately met. Now, it is evident that the
most complete and elaborate system of schools and uni-
versities provided and controlled by the State may, in this

2o6 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

sense, not be a national system of education at all, for it
may fail to respond to the nation's need for culture and
guidance. As Mr. Rose remarks on the elaborate State
system of Napoleon : " To all those who look on the
unfolding of the mental and moral faculties as the chief
aim of true education^ the homely experiments of Pesta-
lozzi offer a far more suggestive and important field for
observation than the barrack-like methods of the French
Emperor." ^ On the other hand, it is conceivable that
private provision and management might meet those
needs — as in the case of ancient Athens — though in
a large modern State it would probably be impossible
to secure this without some help from the State in organi-
zation, and unlikely that sufficient funds would be avail-
able. In England till recently secondary schools were
thus left to private sources of supply, and the universities
are still mainly outside the sphere of State control.

It seems, then, desirable to enquire what are the true
functions of the State in the matter of schools, whether
provided privately or from public funds. It is often
assumed that if the State pays it has the right to impose
what conditions it will. This is to bring into the
spiritual work of education those economic conceptions
of the relation of employer to employed which are being
more and more generally rejected as fundamentally un-
sound. It is recognized that there the relation is not
that of an employing intelligence to an inert mass of
matter, to be shaped, like clay in hands of a potter,
according to his will, but that of free agents contributing
to a common work. So with the State and education.
The State has no true right to dictate how a child shall be
educated, or what he shall be taught, regardless of his

^ Op. cit. ch. 12.

WHO ARE THE AGENTS? 207

needs or of the aspirations of his family. It has no right
to disregard the rights of the family, and among those
rights one of the most primitive is to be allowed to fulfil
its obligations towards its children. Normally, the
State ought not to interfere with the home training of
the children. But when parental duties are obviously
neglected, then both the right of the community to be
preserved from the contamination of evil and incom-
petent members, and the right of the individual child to
opportunity for physical and mental training, justifies
coercive action by the corporate authority. In a word,
the rights of the State are not absolute, but correlative
with those of the parents and of the child. Further,
those rights carry the obligation to fulfil its functions as
effectively as possible, and in a way as beneficial as pos-
sible to the citizens whose lives it is, in this matter,
directing. We have, however, insisted throughout that
the formative work of schools cannot be done well unless
both child and family throw themselves into it. It
follows from this that compulsion is always an evil unless
its working gradually leads to acceptance of the law in
the minds of those on whom it is imposed. Could it be
felt as constraining only by negligent and vicious parents,
its operation would be as good as external authority in
the spiritual life can ever be. Unfortunately, it is felt
by all the working classes, and is felt by them as a
distinctive badge of inferiority. That it has not
succeeded in winning adherence to the principle that
attendance at school is in itself good is made evident
by the fact that the end of the legal obligation is
commonly the end of the recognition of all obligation.
The educational value of a system of scholastic
institutions is not to be gauged by the completeness of

2o8 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

the machinery — that may spell death, and not life. Nor
is it to be estimated by excellence of buildings or cost
to the nation. Its sole test is its adaptation to the work
it ought to do, and the function of corporate action is
to aid in securing that adaptation. As the greatest need
of all is independence of thought and power of initiative,
it follows that the less external regulation of the inner
life of schools of all kinds is found needful the more
perfect is the system as an agent of education.

Our analysis has led us to reject both the extreme
positions — that the State ought to provide all scholastic
institutions and control their mode of working, and that
it has no concern with them. The true view seems to
be a synthesis in which the principles underlying both
these views are held together as complementary to each
other. The State should secure that the provision for
instruction is suitable and available, but it should not
dictate what the schools should do, regardless of the
aspirations and wishes of the parents of the pupils and
of the social classes which send their children to the
various types of schools. So the functions of the State
may be thus summarized — to secure an adequate supply
of suitable schools and other places of instruction : to
secure that the work of various types of schools is
adapted to the various needs of the community : to
secure an adequate supply of suitable teachers : to
guarantee the efficiency of schools and teachers. The
extent to which the State should take direct or indirect
action in any one of these particulars is a matter not of
principle but of expediency. We may be said to have
a national system of medical service without the necessity
having arisen for the direct intervention of the State.
Were the scholastic needs of the nation equally well met

WHO ARE THE AGENTS? 209

without corporate action, the State might look on in
benevolent neutrality, and yet the country would have
a national system of scholastic education in every
important sense of the term.

The mediaeval theory that by birth every child in
Christendom became a subject of the Church — the
visible kingdom of God on earth — and that his obliga-
tion to obedience to its commands was as much higher
than his duty to the secular State as the spiritual is above
the temporal, has, ever since the religious Reformation
in the sixteenth century, become continuously less applic-
able to the facts, especially in countries which have
thrown off corporate allegiance to the Roman Church.
Now-a-days, even in nations in which the religious life
of the people is not organized into many independent
religious communities, and in which the majority profess
adherence to the same church, there is always a minority
who repudiate that allegiance. Nor can any church
enforce its claims by any but spiritual measures and
sanctions. Doubtless, where there is a national or ' estab-
lished ' church it has a theoretical claim to represent the
corporate action of the State on its religious side, but
that claim is practically ignored, and it may even happen
that the Government which represents the State is,
individually and collectively, antagonistic to that church.
Churches possess only spiritual authority, and in practice
they can exercise that over those only who voluntarily
accept it. Active membership of any organized religi-
ous body implies such acceptance, so that the claim of
a church to teach with authority in matters of faith
must be recognized by its own members, or it ceases to
be a church at all. It may still hold together and
undertake various forms of beneficent action, but it

2IO WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

has changed its character from that of an authorized
exponent of divine truth to that of an association for
mutual spiritual edification and for the promotion of
human ends.

While the Church was generally recognized as the
organization of the nation for all spiritual purposes,
the care of the instruction both of young and old was
naturally regarded as its province. Now that it has lost
this position in men's minds its practical function in
education is the training of the young in active member-
ship of its own community. The religious life has of
necessity two sides — that of personal relation to God,
and that of fellowship in " the household of faith."
Though practically all Christians recognize both aspects,
yet the various religious bodies do so with very different
degrees of emphasis. This may, indeed, be said to be
the fundamental difference between the Catholic and the
Protestant conception of religion, and it accounts for the
fact that while many Protestants are at present willing
to accept a teaching of religion from which all reference
to an organized Church is carefully eliminated, those
who lay greater weight on the corporate conception
reject it. To the one the essence of religion is inde-
pendent ot distinctive doctrine and of church member-
ship ; it is the private drawing near of the soul to God.
The seeking of church membership is a consequence of
personal religion, and aids it through the support derived
from the sympathy of others. To the other this very
drawing near is normally through divinely appointed
channels of which the visible and organized Church is
the guardian, so that conscious membership of the
Church is of the essence of the Christian life. But no
one can intelligently live as a member of a community

WHO ARE THE AGENTS? 211

to whose nature, laws, and modes of thinking and acting,
he is a stranger. The doctrines believed are the frame-
work of the religious life ; for faith is the great support
of love, and so counts for much in the determination of
conduct. Thus, religious teaching must be distinctively
doctrinal, in the sense that such a comprehension of the
faith of the Church as children are capable of attaining
should be striven for, and that the duty of believing that
divine truth is deeper than childish understanding, and
is to be accepted as revealed in the teaching of the
Church, should be inculcated.

The educative function of organized religious bodies
is, then, now-a-days conceived in two ways. In one,
membership of the community is unessential, and is to
be left to later personal choice. In the other, that
membership is essential, and is, therefore, regarded as
both a duty and a privilege carrying with it obligations
both of belief and thought and of corporate act. The
enforcement of conclusions drawn from either principle
on those who hold the other cannot be justified, whether
it be attempted by Church or by State. That is religious
intolerance. To subject the children of those who hold
the traditional Catholic view to ' undenominational '
.teaching is as great a violation of conscience as to subject
the children of those who dissent from a church to its
dogmatic teaching. To those who hold the corporate
conception ' undenominational ' teaching is essentially
dogmatic, in that its fundamental assumption is the
dogma that membership in a Church which teaches
definite doctrines is not an essential factor in religion.
There can be dogma of negation just as truly as dogma
of assertion. The inability of many advocates of
undenominationalism to understand the corporate posi-

212 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

tion is a striking example of how habitual prepossessions
of thought render men blind to what to others seems an
axiomatic principle.

On the practical difficulties of undenominational
teaching it is not necessary to say much. Basedow
claimed that the Philanthropinum at Dessau was
genuinely undenominational, and that Roman Catholics,
Lutherans, Calvinists, Jews, and Mohammedans could
receive its religious teaching without offence. Even
then it would seem that atheists — who were a good deal
in evidence in the eighteenth century — were not con-
sidered, and that Basedow had no conception of the
Catholic view of corporate church life. While people
are of all religions and of none, and while in every large
town there is a considerable cosmopolitan population,
it would seem plain that no form of common religious
teaching, which would be inoffensive to everybody, is
possible in schools which the children of all attend.
* Undenominational ' religious teaching based on the
Bible is in practice either not religious or not undenomi-
national. Frequently it adopts the former alternative,
and deals with the history, geography, and literature,
contained in the Bible, drawing from it lessons of
morality, but saying little or nothing of matters which
pass beyond the bounds of morality or of poetry into
the domain of religion. It can only be really religious
when it is given by an earnestly religious teacher, who,
of course, is a member of some church holding its own
doctrines. No matter how conscientiously the definite
inculcation of such doctrines is avoided, they have
formed the teacher's thought, coloured his conceptions,
and determined his attitude, so that they give an uncon-
scious bias to his teaching. Moreover, as has been said.

WHO ARE THE AGENTS? 213

the assumption that dogma is negligible is itself
dogmatic.

The theoretical claim of the National Church to be
the authorized teacher of the whole nation has in practice
to be reduced to that of being authorized to teach her
own children and to offer her instruction to all others
who may be willing to accept it, and this claim she shares
with all other religious bodies. It is notorious that many
parents who are not active members of any religious
congregation are quite willing, and sometimes anxious,
that their children should have a religious training.
Now, the position which we are throughout maintaining
implies that the State has no right to run counter to
parental aspirations and wishes in matters of religious
belief. The wealthy classes can still choose for their
children schools in which their own religion is both
taught and practised. The middle and working classes
have the same inherent right.

It is not a matter of religious instruction confined to
fixed periods in the school life. A religious school is
religious throughout. As Eucken says : " Religion does
not mean a special domain by the side of others ; its
intention is rather to be the innermost soul and the
supreme power of the whole life." ^ A clear insight
into the practical diflficulties, and consequent unlikeli-
hood, of securing this in schools maintained and
controlled by the State was one of the grounds on which
such leaders of Nonconformist thought as Mr. Baines
opposed State interference. In one of his letters to
Lord John Russell he wrote : " Religion ... is not an
isolated department of knowledge, to be kept in a corner
of the mind ... it should be an all-pervading principle. . .
^ Lifers Basis and Life's Ideal, trans, by Widgery, p. 7.

214 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

Religion includes not only the knowledge of God, but
of ourselves. It gives us not only the standard of duty,
and the rules of action, applying to all the relations of
men with each other, in communities and families, in
business and politics, but it goes into the inner man and
supplies the purest motives, the strongest principles,
and the highest aspirations." ^ A school, therefore, can
be a thoroughly effective agent of religious education
only on condition that its whole atmosphere is religious,
that it can assume religion as the basis of morality, that
religion is the under-current of its life. True religion
in school can no more be confined to the first or last
period in the school day than can the influence of vital
religion in life be restricted to Sundays.

The current confusion between education and instruc-
tion has led to many misconceptions as to what 'religious
education ' really means. If we hold firmly to the view
that education is training in life, it becomes plain that
religious education is training in the religious life, and,
therefore, influences the whole of life. There can be no
religious education without religious discipline and
observances, as well as religious instruction. Formerly
the Church acted directly through the schools upon the
children of all classes. Now such direct action is con-
fined to Sunday schools, and the action of any church
on day schools wholly or partially supplied by the State
is very restricted. If religion is the basis of all true
education this is much to be regretted. The provision
of a complete set of denominational schools, logical as
it appears in abstract thought, is beset by practical
difl^culties, which would be great even were that solution
acceptable to the great mass of the people ; for the

^ Letter 7.

I

WHO ARE THE AGENTS? 215

number of religious bodies is very large and the
adherents of some of them very few. People, moreover,
are governed less by reason than by sentiment in contro-
versial matters of religion, and the adverse sentiment of
a large party in the nation puts such a solution outside
the range of practical politics. The provision of various
forms of denominational teaching within every school
would meet the requirements of religious education very
imperfectly, even if it could be successfully organized.
But, at any rate, it would be an important step in the
direction of recognizing, and trying to meet, the desires
of the parents in the matter of the religious training of
their children.

To the home, the Sunday school, and various religious
organizations into which the children may be voluntarily
gathered, every church must chiefly look in its endeavours
to win and retain the children. Laments are frequently
heard from ministers of religion that the children are
being lost to the churches. That seems quite a natural
result of the extrusion of the schools from definite
religious organizations. But the situation must be faced
as it is, and it may be urged that the churches would do
well to bring definite religious influences to bear on the
parents to take up more seriously and strenuously their
parental responsibilities. It is one of the chief privileges,
of a religious home to lead its children into fellowship,
ever growing closer, with the church to which it owes
allegiance. The Church, no m^ore than the State, can
afford to dispense with the impetus of family influence.
The more the channel of the ordinary school becomes
unavailable, the greater is the need for the invention and
perfection of substitutes for it. If religion is the centre
of all true education, our present system in England

2i6 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

seems to be in very grave danger of degenerating into a
very partial training — the cultivation of the intellectual
and practical powers, combined with serious neglect of
the very highest expression of human life.

The school is the meeting-point of the child and the
nation ; it is at once the complement of the family and
the expression of national life. It is called for equally
by the inability of the family to undertake the whole
of the training of its children, and by the need of the
nation that its young citizens should enter the common
life well equipped in body and mind, and with a sense
of social duty and obligation. Whether it be provided
and controlled by the State, supported by the families
which send their children to it, or maintained partly by
some old endowment and partly in one or both of the
other ways, matters not in this respect.

The school is, then, an extension of the home circle
and a miniature of social life. To the extent to which
it is in touch with home thought and feeling, so that the
narrower interests and sympathies of home expand easily
and without conscious effort into the wider and less
personal relations of school, it is successful in performing
its task of widening and deepening those interests and
sympathies. To the extent to which it holds itself
aloof from home aspirations and views, and exalts itself
as an independent power, it is condemned to failure in
all its highest functions. The school should develop
and clarify the opinions and views brought from home,
but be careful to avoid setting itself in opposition to
them. Its own influence must work from within if it
is to be successful, and it cannot do that unless it start
from the stream of living energy which has its source
in the home life. It seems necessary to insist on this,

WHO ARE THE AGENTS? 217

because enthusiasts for school training continually write
and talk as if the school could disregard the home ;
as if, indeed, it received its pupils without experience,
or the ideas, views, and trends of longing, which experi-
ence forms. No doubt, in childhood these are weak and
tentative, but the influences which gave them birth
continue to nourish them. Either the school and the
home conjoin their forces, or they set them in more or
less thorough-going opposition to each other. The
school cannot lessen the force of the home life, and it is
simply shutting one's eyes to facts to ignore it. Sixty
years ago a dignitary of the Church wrote : " Were we
to consider only the resolutions, bills, essays, speeches,
and schemes, with which this country is deluged on the
subject of education, we might be led to conclude that
England was a nation the entire youth of which were
orphans or foundlings. No influence of home is recog-
nized : the very existence of a parent is ignored." ^ The
words have much truth to-day, and they indicate the
greatest danger to which such a specialized institution
as a school is subject — the temptation so to exalt its
own office that its true place as intermediary between
family and nation, and delegate of each, is forgotten.
The authorities which control school administration are
called ' Education ' authorities, and this is good in so far
as it emphasizes the traditional English view that the
function of schools is something wider and more
important than teaching. But in so far as it encourages
the mistake that school is the one special place of educa-
tion, and that all education is schooling, it is mischievous
in its influence on the thought of parents, of adminis-
trators, and of teachers.

1 Archdeacon Coxe : Charge, 1855.

21 8 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

In relation to the elementary schools the opinion is
often not obscurely hinted at, and sometimes openly
expressed, that the school's duty is to counteract the
influence of the home. This is to take up a deplorable
attitude. The influence of the home may be defective,
but the one chance of improving it is to accept it as
far as it has any good in it, and to work in harmony
with it and through it. That the general tone and the
standard of judgement on conduct are often lower than
pure morality would dictate is as true of the working
classes as of all other social ranks, but it may be doubted
whether they are so much lower as difi^erent in expression
from those of the classes which so readily condemn them.
Often, no doubt, the efforts of working class homes
appear clumsy and ill-directed to people whose social
training and outlook are different ; but much of that is
a matter, not of moral inferiority, but of social conven-
tion. In any case, there is a moral tone and a standard
of conduct into which the children grow, and if the
school would raise them it must get inside them, not
attempt to remove the children into a tone and standard
at school which implicitly throws doubt on those at
home.

In the training of character and conduct, as in that of
thought and intellect, the full force of the child's spiritual
life is needed. This involves that he feel himself an
active member of the social community, and not simply
an item under the direction of another's will. '-School
is not primarily for the teacher but for the pupil." ^
When this is forgotten there may be extreme quiet and
decorum of behaviour in school, and the whole machine
may work smoothly ; but it is nothing but a machine,
^ H. Caldwell Cook: Perse Play Books, No. 2, Introduction, p. 10.

WHO ARE THE AGENTS? 219

and its action either crushes the spiritual life of those
submitted to its working, or gives to that life an impulse
of opposition to all it represents. While producing an
outward simulacrum of the law-abiding spirit it often
forces into an unnatural and premature activity the spirit
of lawlessness. The root objection to a martinet govern-
ment of children is that in its very nature it is antithetical
to education, in that it is an official negation of the
child's will.

The most important of the functions of a school is to
initiate the child into a society in which the relations
are less those of affectionate service and tolerance than
those of mutual rights and obligations. In it he learns
that he must treat with equal justice those whom he
loves, those who are indifferent to him, and those whom
he dislikes ; that his own wishes must often give way to
the desires or customs of his fellows ; that there are
rliles to which he must conform ; that there are many
authorities besides the obvious one of the masters. In
a word, he begins to learn by experience what it is to
live in a world among his equals, under a regulated
system of laws and customs. Unless this grow out of
the life in the out-of-school circle, and continually return
into it, the child is not being truly formed. A double
personality is being developed, and a severe blow is dealt
to natural honesty and frankness. As Mulcaster well
said, over three hundred years ago : " This mannering of
them is not for teachers alone, because they communicate
therein . . . both with naturall parentes, to whom that point
appertaineth nearest, as of most authoritie with them,
and with all honest persons, which seing a child doing
euill, are bid in conscience to terrifie and check him as
the quality of the childes offence, and the circumstance

220 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

of their owne person doth seeme best to require." ^
This wise old Elizabethan schoolmaster, with over a
score of years' experience behind him, saw clearly that
out-of-school and in-school influences must harmonize
and work together if the education of the child is to
prosper. So he puts as first " of all the meanes which
pollicie and consideration haue deuised to further the
good training vp of children, either to haue them well
learned, or vertueously manered . . . conference between
those persons, which haue interest in children, to see
them well brought vp." - And, recognizing the import-
ance of the influence of the social circle he recommended
conference between parents and neighbours, teachers and
neighbours, parents and teachers, and teachers and
teachers. In short, he conceived education as a social
work, and, therefore, one which concerns the whole
community. Though he was insistent on the special
nature of the teacher's functions, and on the consequent
need of definite training for them, he gave no counten-
ance to the idea that teaching is the whole of education,
or that education as a whole is a specific profession.
The teacher is an organ through which the family and
the community carry on that work of general interest
of training the children ; in his mode of working he is
a specialist, but his special skill should be exercised in
harmony with social opinion and desires. This is the
essence of Mulcaster's views on the matter, and though
the plans he suggested for giving them effect must be
modified to meet the change in social conditions, yet it
seems to us that they are both essentially true and very
pertinent to our present-day needs.

The problem of first importance for the school is, then,

^ Positions, ch. 5. - Ibid. ch. 44.

WHO ARE THE AGENTS? 221

how to take up the child's natural energy, with the trend
and colouring it has already received, into the school life,
and so, by the careful organization of that life, to
ennoble it — to prune away the faults and strengthen the
weaknesses of its developing attitude ; and how in doing
all this to win the support of the outside opinion amid
which the child lives. It is only another phase of the
perennial task of making the interaction between the
individual and his environment as prolific as may be of
good results. No movement of recent years has been
more successful in winning the support of the home
circle, and the enthusiastic devotion of the children them-
selves, than that of Boy Scouts and Girl Guides. For
these reasons the movement is full of educational vitality,
and only when the schools can show equal success in
getting inside the lives of their pupils, so as to leaven
them, will they, too, be full of educational life.

The Scout movement is successful because it recog-
nizes practically that the child and the youth have
self-respect which only needs a sense of responsibility to
grow into a very valuable ruler of conduct ; that they
are not opposed to law when the demands of the law
are congruent with their nature ; that they have
abundant vital energy which must find a vent either
in following out their own purposes or in doing its best
to burst the bonds with which authority tries to confine
it. All these valuable trends of spiritual life are
cherished in the Scout movement, not regarded as
manifestations of original sin to be borne with what
patience we may when they cannot be repressed. It is
because they are cherished that a boy or girl gets true
education of character as a Scout or a Guide.

The school should act on the same principles in ways

222 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

adapted to its own conditions. It should organize its
pupils as a self-governing community of which the
teacher is a part, not as a gang of slaves among whom
only the will of the master counts for anything. It
should win to its side the force of life which must other-
wise act against it : it should train that self-respect which
is also respect for the good name of the school because
it is 'my' school, to which it is my pride to belong and
which it would be my shame to disgrace. Then will
the spirit which has its fount of inspiration in the school
permeate the whole life, and the unity on which we are
insisting will be promoted. What home is there which
would not be delighted to see its boys and girls growing
in true manliness and womanliness, and would not be
itself affected by its reaction to the growing spirit of a
noble life which animates its children ? That is a way
in which the school can improve the homes, and its
influence may well be as beneficial in one social class as
in another.

The pupils can throw their vitality into the service of
the school only when they feel that they have a responsi-
bility for its work, its discipline, and its good name.
Thus some form of corporate self-government is
demanded, and, through this, personal self-government
is developed. Schools and classes have been success-
fully organized as ' Junior Republics ' ; in others,
details of administration are placed in the hands of the
pupils with excellent results. This is the spirit that
underlies the prefect system which is traditional in the
great public schools, and is acknowledged to be their
most effective instrument of education. It has been
found by experience to be thoroughly successful in
schools of all grades, and with pupils of all ages. Mr.

WHO ARE THE AGENTS? 223

H. Caldwell Cook gives as the result of his experience
with lower forms in a secondary school : " The most
well-ordered classes are those in which a body of boy-
officials has control," ^ and the application of the
principle in elementary schools has led to equally happy
results.

In a very suggestive pamphlet on the introduction
of self-government through a system of prefects into
some of the elementary schools in Warwickshire, Mr.
Jewsbury well indicates the objects sought : " To
endeavour to turn out manly boys who know and are
prepared to do the straight thing, the right thing,
simply because it is straight and right ; to make them
feel the sense of responsibility, to train them in
self-reliance and power of initiative, to teach them
self-respect, to feel something of the corporate nature
of a school and that the school as a whole in char-
acter, reputation and usefulness is affected by the
actions and conduct of individuals ; to arouse a keen
interest in all that concerns the school, to have a reason-
able pride in their school and a constant care for its
honour and good name." ^ Mr, Jewsbury emphasizes
the good effect of responsibility on boys who have no
great love or aptitude for ordinary lessons, who thus gain
an interest in school life which before was lacking, and
both develop in self-respect and win the respect of their
schoolfellows by proving that they, too, can do well
something well worth doing. Similarly, Mr. Cook
remarks " It has proved a good plan to put in authority
aged persons who otherwise might be in danger of doing
little or nothing." ^ It might be added that this kind

^ Perse Play Books, No. 4, Introduction, p. 21.

2 The Prefect System i>: Elementary Schools, pp. 4-5. ^ Op, cit. p. 22.

224 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

of training is the best possible, not only for them but for
all children. The spiritless little book-worm, so apt to
be regarded as the prize product of the school, fore-
shadows in his ineptitude for responsible office his
probable obscurity in later life.

Mr. Jewsbury anticipates that such a system, extended
as it is to the pupils' out-of-school life, may at first be
regarded as organized espionage both by some of the
children and by their parents ; but he is convinced, from
the actual working of the plan, that when it has been
wisely introduced its critics soon become its advocates.
Of course, the winning of this public approval means
that a great step has been taken in the unifying of the
influences of home and school. Moreover, especially in
dealing with offences out of school, " the co-operation
of parents ... is most valuable, and should be sought
at all times. All serious matters should be brought
directly to their notice ; and if they can be got to
work with and support the Head, much good will be
done." ^

No movement seems to us so full of promise for
weaving schools of all grades into the lives of the people,
for reviving the parents' feeling of interest in the training
of their children and sense of responsibility for a large
and important part of it, for concentrating in the line of
the training of character that innate spiritual force which
otherwise is so woefully squandered, than this for
securing the active co-operation of pupils in promoting
the corporate welfare of their school.

The extent to which the same kind of co-operation
of both children and parents can be obtained in that
intellectual work of the school which is its second

IP. 17.

WHO ARE THE AGENTS? 225

important function depends upon the same general
conditions. The system of self-government in school
succeeds because it wins to its service natural impulses
and desires of children, and in no way runs counter to
their interests. If the lessons are equally congruent in
matter and method with impulses to mental activity they
will similarly be taken up into the intellectual life. The
desire to learn is as innate and as strong as is the desire
to act. The dullest and most inert student of school
lessons shows abundant keenness in acquiring the know- f
ledge which attracts him because it seems to him worth
having. All observers of the young have pointed out
this characteristic, but, as a rule, schools have taken little
account of it. What the mature scholar thinks children
ought to learn decides what is put before them, and both
in nature and in amount this has led to a method of
teaching which treats the children as passive recipients
of the knowledge of others. The point of view of the
selectors and that of the prospective learners are neces-
sarily very different ; so it is hardly matter for wonder
that in school studies there has so often been a great gulf
between what is and what ought to be. For long weary
years schools spent their time in trying vainly to get
their pupils to recognize the beauties of the classics and
the advisability of exertion in order to master the
languages in which they were written, or to assimilate
the dry bones of facts in English subjects. No call was
made on the imagination, nothing was given to stir the
heart and inspire fruitful constructive thought or provide
means for its practical outcome in act. Lessons were to
the children dull and profitless, for they did not give the
sense of increasing power and growing wealth of life.
It was evident that the results of the schools' efforts

226 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

were wholly incommensurate with the time and labour
bestowed, and to justify continuance in the hoary
scholastic tradition it had to be assumed that this grind-
ing of the air — as it must inevitably have appeared to
the young grinders — was in itself an excellent way of
strengthening the mental muscular system. The ques-
tion whether such strengthening could not be attained
concurrently with more demonstrable benefit was for long
not seriously faced, and is still regarded by many with
suspicion as a sign of a tendency towards a ' soft
pedagogy.' "As though work and play, pleasure and
learning, a measure of natural freedom and a natural
measure of restraint were mutually exclusive terms. By
Play I mean the doing any thing one knows^ with one's
heart in it." ^

To set beings so full of vital energy and so practical
in outlook as are the young to grinding for the sake of
grinding, with no visible flour resulting wherewith to
make bread, is to take the very surest way to arouse their
antagonism to the whole process. For long this anta-
gonism extended to the masters, and the schools failed
in the cultivation of the true feeling of corporate life as
markedly as in general intellectual influence. That
division of the school world into two opposed forces of
masters and boys has come to an end in all that relates
to personal intercourse in proportion as the principle of
recognizing the boys' rights, and enlisting their friendly
co-operation in discipline, has been acted upon. It is by
no means at an end in the matter of lessons, because the
same principle is so often explicitly rejected or implicitly
ignored. It is still quite a common tradition that the
boy will, as a matter of course, shirk his lessons when-
^ H. C. Cook : Pfrse Play Books, No. 4, pp. 64, 62.

WHO ARE THE AGENTS? 227

ever he can, and this tradition influences masters as well
as boys. Its abolition is the greatest intellectual reform
needed in the schools, but it can only be removed on
similar lines to those which have succeeded in replacing
enmity by friendly co-operation in matters of personal
relation. That was accomplished by harmonizing the
attitudes of boys and masters, by frankly accepting the
boy as he is and giving him in school relations the kind
of outlet for his energies which he cares to take, instead
of leaving him to find one in illegitimate ways and then
punishing him for following the promptings of his
nature in the only paths left open to him. Similarly,
intellectual outlets which the pupils care to take must be
provided in school studies, and this means the frank
acknowledgement that the starting-point must be found
in what they esteem of value, and the impetus in what
they take joy in doing. The main end of education,
even in school, is not the training of the intellect, but
the preparation for a full and noble life, and such prepara-
tion must concern itself with the heart far more than with
the head — with feelings of worth, standards of right and
wrong, and principles and habits of action, all taken up
into the very inmost core of being.

In the matter of what is taught schools which are as
yet independent of State control have to break only the
bonds of tradition. Those which are under public
authorities have the harder task of attaining and pre-
serving their liberty. In all, the matter of how the
teaching is given is more fully under the teacher's
control, though his freedom is restricted by the necessity
usually imposed on him of meeting the requirements of
examinations or of inspectors, representing, it may be,
a view of educative instruction very different from his

228 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

own and able to back that view by the sanctions of
public credit and necessary income.

In every case the educational problem is to adapt the
work of the school to the demands from without, when
once these are recognized as expressing needs naturally
felt by the children of the class of society which supports
the school. The public schools have made great con-
cessions to the modern view of desirable knowledge, but
it would be somewhat bold to assert that the process of
adaptation to modern life and thought has yet gone as
far as is desirable, and certainly the public school boy is
not usually remarkable for enthusiasm for his school
studies. The schools for the middle and working classes
are now largely under either local or central public con-
trol or both, and it seems to be assumed that in this way
public opinion is brought to bear on their working. But,
except in the most general sense, this is open to question.
A town council may be an efficient body for general local
administration and the allocation of the produce of the
rates, and a Board of Education may well perform similar
functions in relation to schools for the country as a whole.
But neither can be accepted as a sure exponent of the
views, aspirations, and needs, of the families which send
their children to different schools. The administrative
bodies are not in sufficiently close touch with any one
class, and are more or less in the clutch of their own
machinery. The late E. A. Freeman spoke of " the
slower understandings of men whom official routine
hinders from looking facts in the face," ^ and the history
of schools has supplied many illustrations of the truth
of the remark in the attitude both of schoolmasters and
of administrators. Not the good will, but the clear
1 History and Conquests of the Saracens : Preface.

WHO ARE THE AGENTS? 229

insight into the particular needs of individual schools,
must be lacking to men who direct the administration of
all the schools of a nation, or even of a district.

That scholastic ' idol of the theatre ' which assumes as
an axiom the necessity for the learning of certain facts,
though they are but an infinitesimal part of the rich
stores of human knowledge, is at the bottom of much
official laying down of schemes of study. Once this
phantasy is banished the way will be open for an unpre-
judiced determination of the work of each school
separately by a consideration of the actual needs it has
to meet. The local authority should be a combining
centre, securing that all the needs of the district are met,
and that waste is avoided ; for, as the community is
increasingly made aware, schools cost money. But
each school presents its own problem, though those of
many schools of the same grade — especially elementary
schools — in the same district may be closely similar.
For the satisfactory solution of the problems of teaching
the co-operation of the parents in influencing their
children is required, and to secure this their opinions
and wishes must not be ignored. At the same time the

D

relation of the work of the school to the wider needs of
the community has to be kept in mind. Lastly, the
expert knowledge of the teacher is needed to secure that
the objects sought by the school are not narrow or low,
and to organize the means by which those objects are to
be attained. As he is entrusted with the actual work,
his active sympathy with those objects is as indispensable
a condition of success as is that of the children and their
parents. No school can be a really effective agent of
education unless each teacher is in real and hearty
sympathy with the whole lives of his pupils, so

230 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

that his ideals for them are realizable because of that
affinity.

Some mode of making articulate these three trends of
opinion, and of synthesizing them into one great stream
of school life, is much to be desired. Perhaps consulta-
tive committees on which parents, teachers, and official
administrators, met and discussed the aims and general
work of each school would meet the case, if the parents
could be convinced that the deliberations would really
have weight in the decision of what intellectual fare the
school should offer for the consumption of their children.
As the influence of the family on what the children
actually try to learn is both strong and unavoidable, it
would surely be wise to try to secure its active co-opera-
tion, rather than by disregarding it to assure its passive,
if not its active, antagonism.

This need for co-operation is especially felt in the case
of elementary and lower middle class schools. Wealthy
parents can choose a school which broadly meets their
desires, or can provide for teaching at home, but the
lower one descends in the social scale the more the choice
is limited, because, though the schools are many, the
differences between them are slight. They are organized
on the assumption that the relative worth of branches of
learning can be abstractly determined, without reference
to the particular people who are to do the learning. This
is to see incentive as an external force which can be
applied indifferently to any spiritual life, no matter what
its past history may have been, instead of in the stirring
by something cognate to it of an inner dynamic force
already existing. Incentive must be relative to actual
life : both to the life which has been and to that which is
foreseen. That life centres in the family, and every

WHO ARE THE AGENTS? 231

family, though it may have much that is individual to
itself, yet shares in the general views as to what the
children ought to learn which are common to the local
social circle of which it forms a part. No doubt, these
views may be narrow, and they will certainly appear so
to people whose social surroundings have been more
tinged with intellectual culture. They may need en-
larging ; indeed, education is always an attempt to
transcend actual common attainment. But they should
be an important factor in deciding the kind of things the
children in any school should study.

Universal and compulsory schooling for more than a
generation has not convinced the mass of the working
classes of the value of much that their children are
taught in school. The children commonly show that
they share the home feeling by the little enthusiasm they
manifest in much of their work, and by ceasing to pur-
sue their studies immediately external- compulsion is
removed. The few who see in the mental food offered
a means of rising in the social scale, and pass by the aid
of scholarships to higher schools, too often learn to
despise their origin, and are apt to discover that the
knowledge assumed in the circles they wish to enter
includes much besides that which is imparted in school,
and which can only be gained in life. The best of them
succeed, but others are unfitted for one kind of work and
one class of society without being fitted for another.

Certainly the whole school should not be organized as
a forcing-bed for a few children who show most pre-
cocious intellectual promise, but with regard to the needs
of the great majority of its scholars. Those look
forward complacently to living much as their parents
have lived ; they are interested in what bears on that

232 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

sort of life, and both they and their parents are prepared
to welcome all which seems to them likely to improve it.
Did schools, and those who govern schools, but grasp
the vital fact that their efforts are successful in proportion
as they respond to felt needs, and that the needs the
children most feel are related to the opinions which
experience has taught their parents, they would give
more effort to the endeavour to ascertain what the parents
think good, and to make that the nucleus of what they
provide. " The opinion of those who have brought the
children into the world, and worked to bring them up, is
not to be despised. . . . Those who will have the respon-
sibility of putting their children out to work might well
be consulted as to the same children's education. They
know, better than teachers, the life their children will
probably have to lead ; and they recognize, better than
educationalists, that to know how to work, to have the
habit of working cheerfully and well, is more important
than knowledge." ^

The failure of the elementary schools to win the
general confidence of the working classes shows that they
have not given what the parents wish, and have supplied
much about which they do not care. In various degrees
this is true of all our schools, to the extent to which the
decision of what should be learnt is held to be the func-
tion of scholastic authorities independently of the
opinion of the parents and the social circle to which they
belong. It is not at all urged that the school should
have no voice in the matter, but that it should base its
more detailed determination of what it proposes to teach
on a general consideration of what is felt to be needed
for life, and is consequently thought worthy of a real
^ Sefms So ! ch. 20.

WHO ARE THE AGENTS? 233

effort to learn, by the people among whom the children
live, and from whom they derive their prepossessions and
predispositions to value or to contemn what is offered
them. Closeness of relation to the needs, the aspira-
tions, and the estimates of value, current in the homes of
its scholars is an indispensable condition of successful
effort to purify those needs, raise those aspirations, and
revise those estimates. The school, then, loses in effec-
tiveness in proportion as it ignores the home as a co-
operative agent in the education of the children.

In every social grade are children of various capacities.
Most show medium ability both in intellectual and in
practical work, but there are some who are good on one
side but markedly weak on the other. In the world
both the thinker and the practical man are needed, and
opinions might well differ as to which is the more impor-
tant. In any case, the traditional school customs of
providing food likely to attract only the intellectual, and
of stigmatizing as dullards those whose ' brains are in
their fingers,' is hideously unjust and consummately
unwise. Happily, this is being recognized, though as
yet slowly and partially, and somewhat grudgingly.
The needs will only be met when in addition to the
schools of the majority, giving a fair mixture of the
intellectual and the practical, there are also schools in
which each of these forms of capacity is treated as the
handmaid of the other, and oriented in relation to the
requirements of that other. Where but one school is
available, the need can only be met by a frank trifurcation
within it. The giving of the same definite number of
hours of exactly the same practical manual work to every
child, irrespective both of his capacities and of the calls
of interest growing out of his life, is but another mode

234 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION ?

of forcing the growing life into a rigid mould, only less
indefensible than the traditional monopoly of book
subjects because the mould has been made less rigid.

Differences of capacity are in kind and not only in
degree, and they should be the main determinant of the
choice between the actual possibilities of future occupa-
tion open to the child. But one kind of work demands
a different preparation from another, and again the
differences are both in kind and in degree. Some forms
of work taken up after school are in themselves educa-
tive ; notably those in which individual initiative and
adaptability are required. A boy does not cease his
education when he leaves school to enter one of these.
And those who speak from much experience say that
many of them can only be properly learnt when they are
begun at an early age. The interests of true education
demand, not that this opinion be derided, but that it be
investigated, and the age of passing from school to work
decided on the merits of each case, not by a hard and fast
a priori rule based on the assumption that education
always ends when work is begun. There is force in the
contention put forward as representing much working-
class opinion : " Until different types of mind are fully
recognized and developed, not by different degrees of
the same type of education, but by different types of
education, extending not to one leaving-age but to
suitable leaving-ages, the human resources of the nation
cannot be properly organized." ^

It would seem, then, that a real national system of

education demands a much more varied supply of

schools, and a much freer determination of their work,

than the present tendency to the uniformity which is so

^ Seems So J ch. 20.

WHO ARE THE AGENTS? 235

dear to the bureaucratic mind, and is misnamed ' system,'
gives in the present or promises in the future. A true
system is a harmonious synthesis of differences, and in
complex modern life an organization of schools must be
condemned as lacking in system in almost exact propor-
tion as it approaches uniformity. National concern with
the education of its citizens will only have its proper
effect when it is recognized, both in theory and in prac-
tice, that community needs are met by a combination of
individual efforts, and that those needs themselves are a
synthesis of class needs and even of individual needs ; so
that, both to classes and to individuals, is allowed as much
freedom in managing the education of their children as
they enjoy in other matters of less vital importance to
the national welfare. In a word, national care for educa-
tion is most efficient when it is least directly regulative.
One of the chief educational functions of the State is
the securing that the supply of suitable teachers for the
schools is adequate. Here, again, direct action of either
central or local authority is merely a question of expedi-
ency. If the teaching profession could be adequately
staffed by volunteers, there would be no more need for
the policy of nursing now pursued than there is in such
professions as law and medicine. Of course, the key of
the whole situation is a golden one. In other profes-
sions there is a reasonable prospect of securing adequate
remuneration ; so, from the ranks of each are heard
complaints of over-staffing. The supply is not directly
stimulated, though scholarships to places of higher learn-
ing than the elementary school are used as aids in the
somewhat costly preparation required. People join such
professions because they feel attracted towards the work,
and in each they enter a corporate body which guarantees

236 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

their competence. The State does not directly interfere,
yet as each profession adequately meets the national
needs, it gives the country a national system.

With the scholastic calling all is different. It is gener-
ally inadequately paid, and it is only beginning to be
organized tentatively into a corporate profession which,
through a system of registration, will in future guarantee
the efficiency of its members. The supply of entrants
into its ranks is artificially stimulated by the awarding of
bursarships to boys and girls on condition that they
become teachers, and subsequently of scholarships to
help in defraying the cost of their training, which carry
a legal obligation to a minimum number of years' service.
Though primarily intended to staff the elementary
schools, this is also an important source of supply for the
secondary schools, especially those maintained by the
Local Authorities. Naturally, an undertaking to teach
is lightly given by those who could not otherwise secure
the offered resources. So, young people enter upon this
intensely special work, with all its demands upon spiritual
qualities, who feel no call to it, who have little sympathy
with children, and who regard it simply as a not too
objectionable way of earning a living. If they get to
delight in the work all is well ; but if they do not all is
ill, both with them and with their unfortunate pupils.

Entrance into the ranks of teachers in schools of higher
than elementary rank has hitherto been open to any
persons who could persuade principals or governors to
appoint them. Doubtless, many have been drawn into
the work because they were strongly attracted by it.
Such men and women take their profession seriously,
and endeavour by thought and critical examination of
their work to become as efficient as possible. But it is

WHO ARE THE AGENTS? 237

undeniable that this has not been the case with all. Want
of success in some other walk of life, or inability to find
a more attractive way of earning a livelihood, has induced
some to take refuge in school. It is unlikely that such
people will show the true educative spirit and try to
become competent to carry out the difficult task they
have so lightly undertaken.

This haphazard way of staffing the schools largely by
people who have never given serious consideration to the
nature of the work or their own fitness for it is indefen-
sible. It would not be tolerated in any other profession.
No doctor is allowed to practise until he has received an
adequate preparation for his work, but anyone may
undertake the nurture of the souls of the young. It is
recognized that there is a special body of knowledge and
a special kind of skill needed by a man or woman who
would treat the human body : the analogy to the treat-
ment of the soul is seldom acknowledged. It can hardly
be urged that bodily life is less open to observation in
every-day experience than is mental life, that it is in
itself more difficult to understand, or that its health is
more important. No, the root of the belief that no
special preparation is needed by a teacher is the confusion
between the acquisition of information and education.
* One who knows can tell what he knows, and therefore
can teach, and to teach is to educate.' That is the
insecure foundation of the common opinion.

Happily for England it has been commonly recog-
nized that character and personality are essential to a
good schoolmaster, and men of character and personality
influence others both consciously and unconsciously.
Sympathy and the insight into motives and temptations
which comes to sympathetic souls with experience of life

238 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

help even in the earliest dealings with boys. Yet mis-
takes are made, and it is through his errors that the
earnest schoolmaster is led to reflect on his work that he
may improve it. That this has been done with respect
to teaching as well as to dealing with conduct is proved
by the success of many great schoolmasters. It is this
. thinking for themselves, and not the mere continuance
/ in teaching, which has made so many admirable teachers
I of men who had received no special preparation for their
\ work before entering upon it. In truth, by their own
1 thought they trained themselves. No one can read the
j lives and works of great schoolmasters without seeing
! how earnestly they thought about their work. They
\ "worked their facts, and not their theories," as Thring
I put it, but they did work them, and that not doggedly
and mechanically, but as problems to be solved. They
meditated on their work, noted their errors, found the
reasons for them, apprehended the principles which
underlie successful work and invented modes of applying
those principles to their own special problems. So their
work was embodied theory, and theory they had made
their own in the only real way — by living it. This it was
that made them great ; not length of unexamined experi-
ence. Such men gradually train themselves for their
work, but they do it all after that work has begun, unlike
the medical man who learns the theory of his profession,
and the general lines of successful application, before he
begins to practise.

The majority of people who take up teaching for no
very definite reason are little likely to train themselves by
assiduous thought on their work unless they be helped
to do it before entering on the actual life of school. That
is the special function of departments and colleges for the

WHO ARE THE AGENTS? 239

professional training of teachers. There, removed from
the carking cares of the school, the problems of school
life and work may be thought out in the light of the
wisdom both of the past and of the present — thought
out on all their sides : from the point of view of conduct,
from that of knowledge, from that of present and future
service. Thus would the 'born teacher' — the man
whose deepest longings find satisfaction in training the
young — enter on the work with a definite purpose and
clear conceptions, and be saved many a disappointment
to himself, which is also an injury to his pupils ; the
unfit person may learn to recognize his unfitness by the
repulsion he feels for both the theory and the practice of
the work, and may turn his energies into channels in
which they will be at least innocuous to the community ;
the indifferent may receive that inspiration without
which their work will be but mechanical and deadening.
There is, then, abundant justification for the action
of the Teachers' Registration Council in demanding
evidence of professional aptitude, as well as of character
and of adequate learning, from candidates for recognition
as members of the teaching profession. Children in
school should be saved from the experiments of the
teacher who is an amateur in thought as well as in deed.
No matter what preparation is given, the beginner must
always be a beginner in practice, no training can make
him an experienced teacher. But training can and should
secure that he is not a beginner in thought, but that from
the first his efforts are made intelligently — that is, with a
clear conception of the end they are intended to reach,
and of the conditions under which they may be expected
to attain fruition. "We know by experience it selfe,
that it is a mervelous paine, to finde oute but a short

240 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

waie by long wandering " ; ^ it is the function of train-
ing to lessen this pain and shorten this wandering by
making use of the experience of others.

Here comes in a danger incident to training. Teach-
ing is certainly practical work, and the object of training
is to prepare men and women for that work. Is not the
surest way to learn to do anything, first to watch someone
else do it well, and then go and do it oneself? It is so,
broadly speaking, when the activity is one which both
can and should be made, as fully as possible, automatic.
But when it is dealing with life it is not so at all. The
rule-of-thumb procedure which simply imitates the
methods of another demands uniformity of material,
and human minds and dispositions are infinitely various.
Not by external mechanical method, but by sympathetic
inspiration and suggestion, can they be raised to the
activity through which alone they can be educated. It
is, then, from the inner thoughts of the heart that really
efficient teaching springs, and it is far less a matter of
' method ' — except in the broadest sense — than is often
assumed.

Professional preparation has, then, two chief objects.
In the first place, it should aim at awakening in those
who are proposing to become teachers a keen sense of the
importance of the work, enthusiasm for its aims, loving
but discerning sympathy with children, insight into the
spiritual forces which are to be directed. Secondly, it
should endeavour to put them on the right road to the
attainment of skill which will ever increase through years
of practice, because it has nothing fixed or mechanical in
it. Of these, the second depends on the first ; for, unless
the first be well secured the skill attained will be merely

^ Ascham : The Scholemaster.

WHO ARE THE AGENTS? 241

executive, and will be undirected by any clear and
consistent idea of purpose to be attained. A training
college, therefore, in the short session which is at present
deemed sufficient for its work, should aim primarily at
giving an attitude of mind and feeling, at inculcating a
few fundamental principles and securing that each
student applies these in his own way. This should be
the object of practice, which is thus a kind of laboratory
work subsidiary to the more theoretical studies. Here
it is quality, not quantity, that counts. A little work,
really conceived and thought out by the student —
though under the general supervision of the experienced
teacher who is training him — and well considered and
criticized by himself afterwards, does far more than a
much greater amount of practice less exhaustively treated
to develop the habits of mind and feeling which are the
source of all skill which is artistic and life-giving and
not mere mechanical craftmanship. The object of prac-
tical work in a course of study mainly theoretical is to
keep the thoughts and aspirations of the student in close
touch with reality, lest they degenerate into mere dreams
and sentimental longings.

This is only to recognize the limits of possibility.
The time devoted to training is too short both for a
thorough study of theory and for abundant practice.
The course of preparation for a medical man does not
attempt to combine 'walking the hospital' with theo-
retical studies. The latter are made preliminary to the
former, and are illustrated by practical demonstrations.
No one criticizes this on the ground that theory is of no
use to the practitioner, and really such an argument has
no greater weight in reference to preparation for teach-
ing. Unless theory be well digested it is of little worth,

Q

242 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

even if it be not worse than useless as giving an un-
grounded confidence. And to assimilate great and
wide-reaching thoughts demands both time and freedom
from the worry of competing claims.

On the other hand, practical skill cannot be gained
during a training college course. The amount of prac-
tice is too small, and the conditions can never be quite
the same as those under which actual school work is
done. A student does not feel himself, and is not felt
by anybody else — least of all by the children — to be in
the position of a regular member of the school staff.
Real skill can come only through actual experience ; the
business of the theoretical preparation is to secure that
the experience is of a kind to lead to artistic skill and
not to mere mechanical facility. This it must do by
inculcating principles of work, by showing — by demon-
stration followed by experimental application by the
student and free discussion — how they may be applied.

Always, however, it should be insisted that, as true
teaching is the action of the mind of the teacher on those
of his pupils, no person's method can with profit be
slavishly followed by another. The most dangerous
temptation to all engaged in the training of teachers is
insistence on the supreme value of specific methods of
teaching the various branches of knowledge. Those
who are being trained are young, often impressionable,
and always inexpert. The lessons given before them by
those who are training them win their admiration, and
are taken as models for imitation. They see a successful
lesson, and they are apt to attribute the success to the
method, and not to the teacher. So, too often, they try
to reproduce the form of the lesson instead of to kindle
in their own souls the spiritual fire which made it the

WHO ARE THE AGENTS? 243

good piece of work it was. On this rock, indeed, train-
ing has often split in the past, so that to many minds it
implies the production of mechanism. People went to
Yverdon to learn the ' method ' of Pestalozzi, and many
brought away with them nothing but a machine for
killing thought. Many have practised the ' method ' of
FrcEbel's kindergarten in such a way as to make it a
dreary round of mechanical tricks. So it is ever.
Nothing is more deadening than a stereotyped method,
and no idea is further removed from a true conception of
education than that detailed modes of teaching can be
set forth which are applicable by all teachers, to all
children, in all circumstances. In education it is the
spirit, and the spirit alone, that quickeneth. Heart to
heart and mind to mind is every piece of really educative
teaching, and in that intimate contact the only method
possible is that which is in the very life of the mind which
directs. This is not to disparage method : on the con-
trary it is to exalt it as far as the living and creative is
above the lifeless and deadening.

Skill in teaching is, then, most surely attained when it
is first sought indirectly through an absorption of the
whole spirit in the aims and general means of education,
so that the mind is oriented, and dynamic forces of life
are excited which are strong enough not to be turned
aside by the difficulties which will daily arise in school.
But that is only the first step. There can be no skill
without practice, so criticized that errors may be detected
and thought given to how such mistakes may be avoided
in the future. This real practice, as distinct from the
demonstrative practice of the theoretical course of pre-
paration, can only take place under actual school condi-
tions. The true teacher is always under training, in the

Q2

244 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

sense that he is ever giving thought and care to make
his work better. If in early years he can get the help of
critical suggestions from more experienced teachers in
the school in which he is working, his progress is likely
to be much more rapid and sure.

The preliminary preparation which can be given by a
training college can never produce skilled teachers. It
fulfils its function when those it sends into the schools
are on the right road to the attainment of skill, and,
what is far more important, so see their work in its rela-
tion to the whole life of the community that they will be
something much higher and better than skilled teachers
— centres from which emanate spiritual life. A training
college only begins the work of cultivating professional
skill. That work must be continued in schools, and will
be best done when skilled supervision of the beginner's
efforts is available. There is need that this should be
recognized professionally, for until it is, the work of
training cannot be adequately done. After the course
of the training college should follow a course in approved
schools, corresponding to the hospital training of the
medical man. There, under the guidance of competent
masters and mistresses, the actual working-out of prin-
ciples, the becoming familiar with questions of organiza-
tion and practical discipline, and all else that makes the
competent schoolmaster or schoolmistress, should be
studied. Only then should the course of professional
training be regarded as complete.

A training college is, then, only one of the agents of
training, and its course only a step in the process. It
would be well if its students should, before entrance,
have seen enough of school life and work to know
whether it appeals to them, and to understand the matters

WHO ARE THE AGENTS? 245

to be considered, but they should not have served on the
staff of a school long enough to have formed stereotyped
habits of dealing with children. Its essential work
should be the development of an educative spirit and the
apprehension of the fundamental principles underlying
the means that spirit will use ; in a word, theoretical, in
the sense of being primarily concerned with thinking and
feeling, not in the sense of being up in the clouds, or dis-
connected from actual life. Though theory is necessary,
theory remote from fact is mischievous. The college
course should be followed by a training in school, where
the emphasis would be laid on that practical effort which
in the training college work should be subordinate.
Surely the art of teaching is held in low estimation when
it is assumed that it can be acquired in one session at a
training college.

We shall be in a false position so long as schools
complain that the training colleges do not send out
skilled teachers, but people who have largely still to
learn their work, and the training colleges accept the
assumption that the production of skilled teachers ought
to be expected of them. Both schools and training
colleges need to appreciate more truly the function in
teaching of vital and creative ideas, and to put mere
dexterity in the ' tricks of the trade ' in its proper very
subordinate place as an educative instrument. And vital
ideas cannot grow in an ordinary mind while it is
harassed by the minutiae of unfamiliar practical work,
and filled with the trivial but disturbing details which
accompany the efforts of the tyro in teaching. The
training college course should be the teacher's spiritual
preparation for his professional life ; his workman-like
skill should be acquired subsequently in school.

246 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION ?

A further question remains. Quis custodiet ipsos
custodes? If it be necessary to the efficiency of a
system of schools as an instrument for the education of
the nation's children that the teachers should recognize
the true nature of their work, be inspired by its spirit,
and have thought seriously of its relation to the life of
the community, it is surely at least equally important
that similar demands should be made of all who direct
and supervise the teachers' work, who determine the
kind of schools which shall be maintained, and who
actively administer the whole system. Doubtless,
administrators must look at the problems of education
from a different point of view from that of teachers, but
they should not undertake the duties of an office in
which they can do so much to make or mar without
serious preparation through study of the problems which
will face them. Otherwise we have reproduced in sober
earnest the irony with which Socrates drew the picture
of the self-confident Euthydemus :

" When, my friends, our Euthydemus here arrives at
the proper age, and any state question is proposed for
discussion, it is very evident, from the nature of his
studies, that he will not hold himself aloof from its
councils, and I fancy that he has already prepared a
splendid proem for his public orations, taking precau-
tions against being supposed to have learned anything
from anybody. It is clear, then, that when he com-
mences his harangue, his exordium will be something in
this style : — ' O men of Athens ! never at any time have
I learnt anything from anybody, nor, if I have been
informed that there were certain individuals who were
clever both in speech and action, have I ever sought their
company, nor have I been careful that any of the know-

\

WHO ARE THE AGENTS? 247

ing ones should become my teacher. Nay, I have even
pursued the opposite course, for I constantly avoided not
only learning anything from anybody, but even the
appearance of so doing. Nevertheless, such opinions as
suggest themselves to me spontaneously, I will submit
to you for your consideration.' So, on the part of those
who are seeking to obtain a government medical appoint-
ment, it might answer for them to begin a speech
thus: — 'I, O men of Athens! have never at any time
learned the medical art from any one, nor have I been
desirous to obtain any medical man as my teacher, for I
have constantly avoided not only learning anything from
the medical men, but even the appearance of having
studied this science. Nevertheless, confer upon me this
appointment, for I will endeavour to educate myself by
experimentalizing upon you.' " ^

We are told that " all the company laughed at this
specimen of an exordium," but is it an unfair representa-
tion of the attitude of those who believe no training to
be necessary either for teachers or for those who inspect
and organize their work ? The only explanation is the
common assumption that there is no ' science ' — or
theoretical knowledge — related to school work, and that
none is either necessary or desirable ; that all that it is
possible to know of the art can be gained from experi-
ence, and can be gained in no other way. So the work
of the school is looked at in itself ; out of relation to the
life of the community and with no determinate function
in that life.

It is good to learn from the evidence of Sir Lewis
Selby-Bigge before the Royal Commission on the Civil
Service that the chiefs of the Board of Education " like
^ Xenophon ; Memorabilia, trans, by Levien, bk. iv. ch. 2.

248 WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

men with a taste for education as well as a taste for
administration," ^ and that it is " very desirable that
inspectors should have practical acquaintance, through
experience of teaching if possible, with schools of the
grade they should have to inspect."^ It is not so
satisfactory to find that for the administrative functions
of the Board it is held that " such knowledge is not
essential," ^ for that suggests that the Board's conception
of education is narrowed down to what is done inside a
schoolroom. That administrators, and to a less degree
inspectors, need not be skilled in this is undeniable ; but
unless they are qualified to consider and decide every
question of the administration of schools from the stand-
point of the educational welfare of the nation, they rank
with Euthydemus. Sir Lewis assures us that the Board's
inspectors " are a body of very highly qualified educa-
tional experts indeed," * but that assurance would be
more impressive if the giver had not just expressed the
opinion that " almost everybody is an educational
expert." ^ However that may be, the fact remains that,
like Socrates' medical man, inspectors and administra-
tors become experts by experimenting upon those
submitted to their care ; for no evidence of a preliminary
study of what specially relates to their future work is
demanded. At the most some teaching experience is
preferred in candidates for the inspectorate, and that
gives no guarantee that the wider problems that face the
inspector and the administrator have ever received con-
sideration. It is the same with the administrative
officials of local authorities, and in their case there is no
security that those appointed may not lack even the

^Question 8823, 2 Question 9083. ^ Question 9083.

* Question 9444. ^ Question 9032,

WHO ARE THE AGENTS? 249

personal qualifications which the Board of Education is
careful to secure. So long as those appointed to
administer and inspect have to learn their work empiri-
cally it is more optimistic than rational to expect that
the nation's schools will satisfy the nation's needs.

Certainly, the only way in which a person can now
prepare himself for administrative work in education is
empirically, by rising through subordinate posts to
positions of authority and influence. The natural con-
sequence too often results : he becomes a mere official,
regarding everything from the point of view of
machinery, seeing evidence of successful work in multi-
tudes of statistical returns, apt to measure all by one
hard and fast rule. The reason is that from the first the
routine work so fills his mind and occupies his time that
he has no leisure, even if he feel the need, for a deep
consideration of the broad human problems which lie at
the bottom of all school work, and which do not yield
themselves to statistical measurement. It is most desir-
able that at least one of the universities should institute
a course of training for inspectors and other administra-
tors, as well as one for teachers.

To look forward to the time when all concerned with
schools have wide and carefully considered views on the
work of education in general, and the part schools can
properly take in that work, is to look far ahead. But
surely it is a true ideal, for it is a possible, and undeniably
a desirable, state of things, and one in line, it may be
hoped, with present tendencies. In his ideal republic
Plato saw no salvation for the State unless philosophers
should be kings ; we may urge that the kings — or all
that bear rule or fill office in our scholastic republic —
should at least be philosophers in the sense that, by

2 so WHAT DO WE MEAN BY EDUCATION?

meditation and study as well as by experience, they have
learnt what true education means, what are the mutual
relations of its agents, and in what consists its ineffable
importance for the nation.

INDEX

Ability: general, 20-21

„ : tests of, 18-21 ; 178-179
Administrative work : tendency

of, 228 ; 249
Administrators: training of, 246-

250
Aim of education : divergent
views on, 1-9; 31 ; 33-34 ;
36-38 ; 40-41
Aims of life, 5
Altruism, 46-47

Analysis in mental life, 21-24 > 43
Antitheses : possibility of syn-
thesis, 41-43
Aristotle : on absence of agree-
ment in education, i
Arnold, T. : on function of clas-
sics, 164
„ : on relation of teach-

ing to life, 169
Aichaniy R. : on learning from

experience, 239-240
Authority: in teaching, 180-18 1
„ : negative, 100-103
„ : positive, 1 20-1 21
„ : related to freedom,
97-100 ; 120-122 ;
126-127
„ : suspicion of, 95 ;

119-120
„ : use of, 127-133
* Average ' child, 18
Axiomata media, 31-32 ; 41-43

Baines, E. : on duties of parents,
202

Baines, E. : on religious educa-
tion, 213-214
„ : on State control of

schools, 201 ; 202;
202-203
Board of Education : functions of,

228
Body and soul : relation of, 45-46
Boy Scouts, 221

Bradley, F. H. : on religion in
life, 54
„ : on self-realiza-

tion, 83-84
„ : on social nature

of life, 48 ;
63-64
„ : on specific char-

acteroflife,63
Browning, R. : on growth of moral
sense, 137
„ : on incentive, 90

„ : on knowledge in

life, 62
,, : on nature of com-

munity, 96
„ : on problem of life,

94
„ : on thought and

act, 137
Bur(, Cyril: on psychological
experiment, 23-24

Capacity: differences of, 233-234
Catholic and Protestant views of

religion, 210-212
Character and personality, 85-87

252

INDEX

Character and reputation, 87-89
Character training as aim, 55-38
Child study and education, lo-l I
Church : educative functions of,

209-216
Claparede : tests of fatigue, i 5
Class feeling : influence of, 147-
152; 172; 185; 189-190
Classical curriculum, 164-169 ;

225
Class ideals, 156-158 ; 218
Class misunderstandings, 157 ;

198-200; 218
Common opinions inconsistent,

36-37
Common sense, 36-37
Compulsory schooling, 15?'

207 ; 231 ; 234
Conscience, 52-53
Consequences: discipline of, 104-

105
Constraint and free guidance, 134
Constructive work, 146-149;

155-156 ; 169
Control and payment, 206-207
Cook, H. C. : on community
government,
223
„ : on purpose of

school, 218
„ : on stimulus of

givingautho-
rity, 223
„ : on work and play,

226
Coxe : on ignoring the home, 2 1 7
Credulity, 99-100 ; 153

Direction : forms of, 133-134
Discipline of consequences, 104-

105
Discussion : value of, 28
Doctrinal religious teaching, 211
Duty : law of, 52-53

Edgezvorth, R. L. : on negative edu-
cation of his son, 109-1 10

Education : aim of, 84-91 ; 123

„ : ambiguous use of
term, 2-4

„ : and psychological in-
vestigation, 10-26

„ : a self-active process,
141 ; 207 ; 218 ;
220-227

„ : a spiritual process,
91-93 ; 205

„ : authorityin, 102-103

„ : claim to be a science,
26-35

,, : complete process of,
83-84 ; 124-125

„ : derivation of, 123

„ : divergent views as to
aim, 1-9; 31 ; 33-
34; 36-38; 40-41

„ : formative nature of,
125-126; 184-192

„ : investigation in, 25-
26

„ : limits of, 78-79

„ : necessity for, 126

„ : negative, 103-120;
125

,, : relation to school-
ing, 2-4 ; 79-80 ;
81-82 ; 216-218

„ : religious, 214-216

„ : scope of, 3 ; 77-78 ;
82-83
Egoism, 46-47
Elementary schools, 153-158;

228 ; 230-233
Employers : educational duties

of, 80
End sought determines means,

6 ; 31 ; 37-38 ; 40-41
Environment and individual, 47-

49 ; 61-64 ; 94-95 ; 112-

116 ; 123; 184-186 ; 195-

198
Erudition, 71-72
Eucken : on religious education,
213

INDEX

^53

Eucken : on uncertainty of aim,

40-41
Examinations, 71 ; 175-179

Facts : value of, 72 ; 229
Faculties : mental, 22-23
Faculty : relation to knowledge,

„ : training of, 72-74
Family : authority of, 127-130
„ : educative function of,

187-192
„ : nature of, 129; 186-
187
Fatigue : tests of, 15-16
Fic/iie : on authority of parents,
126-127
„ : on obedience, 128
Flexibility : need for, 135-137
Fouillee , on unaided learning, 181
Freedom in education : limits of,

135
„ : nature of, 95; 110-119
,, : negative, 1 00-101 ;

103-1 10
„ : positive, 110-119
„ : related to authority,

97-100 ; 120-122 ;

1 26-127
Freeman, E. A. : on official mind,
228

Games : undue prominence of,

169
General ability, 20-21
Girl Guides, 221
Girls : schools for, 1 70-1 71
Government: corporate, 221-224

„ : martinet, 21 8-219

Guidance: and constraint, 134

„ : means of, 133-134
Guyau : on examinations, 177
Gymnastic: mental, 72-74

Hamilton, Sir W.\ on liberal
education, 60

Herbart : on determination of
aim, 63
„ : on education for mor-
ality, 56
„ : on necessity for educa-
tion, 36
„ : on utilitarian training,
58-59
Heredity and impulses, 45-46
History: teachingof, 161 ; 162-

163
Holidays : value of, 143-144
Home and school: 153-158;

172 ; 216-218 ; 229-230
Humanity : religion of, 52
Hypotheses of education, 29-30

Ideal : nature of, 101-102
Ideals of different classes, 1 56-158;

218
Imperfect idealism, 55-56
Impulses and heredity, 45-46
Incentive, 89-91 ; 135-137 ;

172 ; 220-227
Indirect quantitative methods,

Individual and environment, 47-
49; 61-64; 94-95; IT2-116;
123; 184-186 ; 195-198
Inductive enquiries : scope of,

7-26
Inspectors : training of, 246-250
Instruction; religious, 2 1 1-2 15
Intellectual and moral culture,

55-58
Intolerance: religious, 21 1-2 12

Jezvsbury, W. : on aim of prefect
system, 223
„ : on co-operation of

home and school, 224
Junior Republics, 222

Knowledge: and mental training,

7+-77
„ : nature of, 76

254

INDEX

La Chahtais : on educational

rights of State, 200
Laws : physical and moral, 7
Learning : active nature of, 144-

145

„ : from others, 144

Lecky : on absence of intellectual

guidance, 182
Lemaitre, J. : on Rousseau, 1 20
Liberal education : nature of, 65-

„ : relation to util-

ity, 67-71
Liberty : negative, 100- loi ;
103-1 10
„ : positive, 110-119
„ : related to authority,
97-100 ; I 20-122 ;
126-127
Life : meaning of, 4-5 ; 8 ; 50-

54; 91-93
„ : purpose of, 5 ; 53-54 ; 83-

84; 89-93; 94
„ : social nature ot, 48; 63-64;

I13-116 ; 193-198
„ : spiritual nature of, 51-55 ;

91-93
Lives of others : knowledge of,

11-13
Local authority : educational

functions of, 185-186; 193;

228; 229
Locke : on secret of education,

134

Mackenzie, J. S. : on family life,

187
Manual construction, 146-149 ;

155-156
Martinet government, 218-219
Masterman : on misunderstanding

of artisan, 157
Materialism, 49-5 I
Means: doctrine of, 9-10 ; 30-32
„ : related to end, 6 ; 31 ;
37 ; 38; 40-41

Means : tests of, 183
Mediaeval method, 152-153
Medicine and education : sciences

of, 26-27
Mental gymnastic, 72-74
Method : nature of, 179-180
Middle class schools, 158-163;

228; 230
Milton : on liberal education,

71
Modern languages, 165 ; 168-169

Modern Sides, 169

Moral and intellectual culture,

55-58
Morality : teaching of, 137-140
Mukaster : on agents of education,
219-220
„ : on conference between
educators, 220

National system of education,

205-209; 234-235
Naturalistic view of man's nature,

43-45
Negative education, 44-45 ; 103-

120 ; 125
Newman, J. H. : on true learning,

181-182

Obedience, 127-133

Official life : tendenc;}' of, 228 ;

249
Officials : training of, 246-250

Parents : educational duties of,
3; 80-81 ; 126-129 ;
207; 213
,, : relation to schools,
153-158; 172; 216-
218 ; 229-233
Payment and control, 206-207
Permanent and progressive studies,

59.
Personality, 84-91

Pesta/ozzi : on liberty and author-
ity, 97; 118 ; 122

INDEX

^55

Pestalozzi : on need for specific

training, 62
Phillpotts, Bp, : on legal rights of

Church, 203 ; 204
Physical Science : methods of in

psychology, 13-23
Pi(/, S(. G. L. F. : on relation of
spiritual to
material, 91-
92
„ : on worship of

money, 65
P/ato : conception of cultured
man, 59-60
„ : on aim of education, 60
Play and work, 145-146; 226
Political freedom, 98-99
Practice: relation to theory, 38-

41 ; 137; 240-245
Precautionary education, 44-45
Prefect system, 222-224
Protestant and Catholic views of

religion, 210-212
Psittacism, 141

Psychological enquiries : and
education, 10-26
„ ,, : difficulties of,

11-12
Psychology : quantitative me-
thods in, 13-20
Public schools, 163-170; 228
Purity: teaching of, 139-140

Quantitative methods in psycho-
logy, 13-20

Rationalism, 49

Real and verbal knowledge, 140-

141 ; 168-169
Reasoning with children on

obedience, 131
Registration of teachers, 236 ;

. 239 .

Religion : in education, 209-216

„ : of humanity, 52

: spiritual, 53-55

Religious intolerance, 21 1-2 12

Repressive education, 46

Reputation, 87-89

ReynoUs and Woolley : on age of
leaving school, 234
„ : on educa-

tion and social
class, 2
„ : on imposi-

tion of class ideals,

157
„ : on impulses,

139

,, : on parents

and school, 232
„ : on value of

school lessons, i 55
„ : on working

class feeling, 199
Richter : on purpose in education,

37
Rose, J. H. : on State regulation
and education, 206
„ : on University of

France, 200-201
Rousseau : anti-social education,
108
Emile at fifteen, 108
Emile at twelve, 107
Emile in manhood,

108-109
incompetence of, 109 ;

120
on forethought, 105
on freedom in educa-
tion, 106
on independence, 113
on negative happiness

of life, 105
on passivity in life, 105
on training for life,
8; 61
„ : rule of negative educa-
tion, 104

Sceptical nature of modern
thought, 153

256

INDEX

Scholastic method, 152-153
School: and home, 153-158;
172 ; 216-218 ; 229-
230
: authority of, 129-130
: educational functions of,

2-4 ; 219-220
: excessive claims of, 157-

158 ; 217-218
: government in, 129-

131 ; 221-224
: lengthening of attend-
ance, 155
: nature of, 129 ; 216
Schools: for girls, 1 70-1 71

,, : for highest classes, 163-

170
,, : for middle classes, 158-

163
„ : for working classes, 153-

„ : varieties of, 233-235
ScAulze : on indirect quantitative

methods, 15-16
Science of education : nature of,

26-36
Science : nature of, 26-27

„ : teaching of, 161- 163
Scientific methods in psychology,

.13-23

Scout movement, 221

Selby-Bigge, Sir L. A. : on quali-
fications of administrators,
247-248

Self-control, 11 6-1 19; 123-
124

Sex-hygiene: teaching of, 139-
140

Skill in teaching : acquirement
of, 243-244

Social class : influence of, 147-
152 ; 172 ; 185 ; 189-190

Social contract, 195

Socrates : on untrained officials,
246-247

Soul and body : relation of, 45-
46

Specialization in study, 161-162 ;

172-175
Spencer, H. : and moral training,
104
„ : on conformity to

public opinion,

149 .

Spiritual life : analysis of, 21-24 j

43

„ „ : knowledge of, 11-

13
Spiritual view of man's nature,

43-45
Spontaneity, 95
State : action of, 204-205
,, : educational functions of,

186 ; 205-209 ; 235
„ : nature of, 194-200
Studies : determination of, 75 ;

153-171 ; 224-234
Subordination : basis of, 96
Supply of teachers, 235-237

Teachers : provision of, 235-

237
„ : trainmg of, 237-245
Teachers' Registration Council,

239
Technical teaching, 160-16 1
Tests: of ability, 18-21 ; 178-
179
„ : of educative means, 183
Theories in education : verifica-
tion of, 34
Theory of education : progress of,
28-32
„ ,, : purpose of,

6
„ „ : value of,

32-33 ; 38-39; 240-245
Theory : relation to practice, 38-

41 ; 137 ; 240-245
Thought : freedom of, 99-100
Turing, E. : on working facts,

238
Tradition : influence of, 152
Training of officials, 246-250

INDEX

257

Training of teachers, 237-24.5
Translations : use of, 166
•Typical' child, 18
Tyranny, 102

Undenominational teaching, 211-

213
Uniform schemes: evils of, 136-

Utilitarian training : danger of,
64-65
,, ,, : relation to

liberal education, 67-71

Verbal and real knowledge, 140-

141 ; 168-169
Vergerius : on a liberal education,

60
Verification of educational

theories, 34
Virtue : possibility of teaching,

137-140

Vives : on knowledge and virtue,

57-58
„ : on purpose of life, 54
Vocational training, Sj-Ji ; 75

IVallaSy Graham : on impulses, i 38
„ : on personal dif-

ferences, 18
Whewell : on a liberal education,

59
„ : on negative education,

120

„ : on permanent and pro-
gressive studies, 59
Work : and play, 145-146 ; 226

„ : habit of, 1 41- 1 43
Working classes : interests of, 153
,, : schools for, i 53-

158; 228; 230-233

Xenopkon : story of Euthydemus,
246-247

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